


HARD LIMIT

by spicyshimmy



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Dom/sub, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-09
Updated: 2012-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-18 07:26:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard’s a sole survivor of the massacre on Akuze and the trauma therapy isn’t helping—not as much as it needs to, not with the survivor’s guilt he’s still carrying nine months after the incident. When he meets Kaidan Alenko in Purgatory one lucky night, finding a safe word winds up being about more than enjoying himself with a stranger who <i>really</i> knows how to kiss. <i>For bad or good, one guy could only accomplish so much. At least, that was what the trauma specialist said during their weekly meetings, the first few months after Lieutenant Shepard became John Shepard, sole survivor.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> A zillion thanks to [Trilliath](http://trilliath.tumblr.com), who was a _spectacular_ collaborator and a pleasure to work with on this Big Bang! Thanks also to [Bioticbootyshaker](http://bioticbootyshaker.tumblr.com), who beta'ed this last-second, and to [Cuddlingthecthulhu](http://cuddlingthecthulhu.tumblr.com), who put this idea into my head in the first place.
> 
> And, since this marks the end of my participation in the Mass Effect Big Bang as a writer and contributor, I just want to thank Alishatorn for organizing the whole shebang (shebigbang?) and AzzyDarling for the hard work in co-moderating it! It's been incredible, and now I can't wait to read all the rest of the fics!

It’d been three days and nine months since Akuze. New life’d been born in that time, human life, and plenty of it—all around the galaxy. Lives’d been lost in that time, too, to make up for everything humanity had gained. There was a reason for keeping the balance. Old soldiers who lasted long enough to sit behind a desk and go over datapad lists of new recruits seemed—by Shepard’s estimation—resigned to that.

Hell, they might’ve even liked depending on it.

Sometimes, there was nothing you could do and you had to accept it. For bad or good, one guy could only accomplish so much. At least, that was what the trauma specialist said during their weekly meetings, the first few months after Lieutenant Shepard became John Shepard, sole survivor.

There was a medal for that and everything, a ceremony for the medal, and Shepard kept it in a glass case next to his bed. Once he healed up—only a week in an Alliance-funded private hospital on the Citadel before he was released—he got a new commission and headed out as a TO, drilling young soldiers like he was one of the old ones now.

He wasn’t.

It didn’t stick.

Three days and nine months since Akuze, Shepard found himself in Purgatory, a brand new club with a name that seemed about right. He could’ve gone with the honorable discharge straight off but all the old soldiers behind their desks said the only thing for it was to get back out there, get back in the game. It’d worked until the nightmares hit, and Shepard wasn’t gonna be the guy out there training fresh blood so they could wind up dead meat. Not sleeping meant missing details; missing details meant losing lives.

Akuze was still there. The colony on Akuze wasn’t. Shepard could taste the fire in the back of his throat and hear it now and then, when there wasn’t some kind of music to drown it out.

‘Brandy,’ he told the bartender. ‘Whatever you’ve got that’s bad and cheap.’

‘Takes all kinds,’ the krogan behind the bar said, polishing off Shepard’s glass and setting it down with a typically krogan thunk. ‘Your credits. Not my problem.’

‘You’ve got a way with people—anyone ever tell you that?’ Shepard rubbed a scar beneath his thumb with his other thumb, thinking about how that worked.

‘Only good thing for a human thinking _philosophical_ is a headbutt or two until he _quits_ thinking,’ the krogan replied. ‘’Cept C-Sec’s got a warrant out on me ‘case I do something like that again. Apparently your kind don’t like broken ribs.’

‘I like ‘em just fine,’ Shepard said.

The krogan snorted, pouring the goods. ‘Then you’re dumber’n the ones who don’t.’

Shepard could drink to that. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said, lifting his glass in the air, and the krogan knocked the half-empty bottle against the rim before setting it down.

‘You’re all right,’ he added. ‘For a dumbass.’

It was a compliment that fit better than anything Shepard was supposed to polish and wear on his chest. ‘I’ll drink to that again,’ he said, and the krogan topped him up. It tasted like Shepard felt, but it had a kick at the end of it, too.

His TO—an officer named Anderson and a pretty stand-up guy, at that—would’ve told him to drop and give him fifty, or as many as it took until he was ready to kick his own ass for that kind of thick-skulled attitude. But Shepard couldn’t drop and give anybody anything crushed against the bar, asari and turian dancers on the floor, soldiers on shore leave shouldering him around as they ordered drinks, and his second brandy half done already in his glass. It was tinted blue, deeper than sky blue, kind of like tropical planet river blue.

All the places Shepard hadn’t been yet and all the views he’d never seen.

He could look it up on the extranet, though. Check it out on an animated brochure or one of the loop-reels they played in parts of the Citadel for recruitment. And Shepard could use that money he had for being honorable—except there wasn’t much honor in living, at least not when it came to Purgatory.

‘This one’s paid for,’ the krogan said, cutting Shepard off while he was reaching for a credit chit. ‘Compliments of some even _bigger_ dumbass who probably thinks you look like you _need_ it.’

‘Attractive dumbass or ugly dumbass?’ Shepard asked.

The krogan snorted again; Shepard was going to have to get a splash-visor if he kept at it. ‘You all look the same to me: small and squishy.’

‘I’ll drink to that, too,’ Shepard said. Then, the krogan looking down to the end of the bar, Shepard lifted his drink and leaned forward, just enough to see who he had to thank for paying.

  
  
ART BY TRILLIATH   


Attractive dumbass. Well-dressed, too, in nicer than what Shepard was wearing—nothing but a beat-up leather jacket and jeans that weren’t in much better shape. The guy with an eye on Shepard’s tab and Shepard’s glass had his hair slicked back and off his face, dark eyes and a white dress shirt. He looked like he’d just come off the extranet, an animated brochure or one of the loop-reels they played in parts of the Citadel to get tourists to buy into the latest trends.

Shepard tipped his glass. The guy nodded and Shepard drank, deep enough to steady himself, not so deep that he’d choke.

When he looked up again, the guy was gone. A group of Alliance brass—off the clock—crashed into him and Shepard shrugged them off, but the hand on his back after they were gone didn’t push or jostle or prod. It just was, warm through the leather and Shepard’s t-shirt, thumb on one of the seams.

‘Hey,’ Shepard’s new friend said, up close and personal. ‘Drinking alone?’

‘Not anymore,’ Shepard replied.

‘Yeah. I guess not.’ The guy chuckled, a sound that had an edge to it, and Shepard could tell he was a soldier—still a soldier, even, with an Alliance shave and Alliance posture but not an Alliance haircut. ‘Kaidan Alenko. So… Does that mean you don’t mind if I join you?’

‘You’re buying,’ Shepard said.

Alenko managed to slide his way into the seat next to him as a turian got up to get out. ‘Yeah, I thought that part through already. You want another?’

‘I’m good.’ Shepard glanced over his shoulder, taking Alenko in by his profile. There was a scar on his upper lip, so small Shepard wouldn’t have seen it if the lights hadn’t strobed at just the right second. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be flirting with me right now—would you, Alenko?’

‘Maybe I would be,’ Alenko said, ‘ _if_ I knew your name.’

‘Shepard.’ There was a second when Shepard didn’t know whether to shake or salute but the shaking won out, and Kaidan’s hand—not on Shepard’s back anymore—squeezed his, thumb tracing one of Shepard’s scars. He had more than a few but about his fair share, all things considered. Maybe even less than that. Nobody’d ever know for certain.

‘Nice to meet you, Shepard.’ Alenko’s thumb lingered before he pulled it back and flagged down their friendly neighborhood krogan with an attitude problem. So—basically—their friendly neighborhood krogan. ‘I usually drink whiskey, myself. Is that stuff you’ve got there any good?’

‘No,’ Shepard said.

‘You looking for something better?’ Alenko asked.

‘No,’ Shepard replied.

_No, sir_ , his brain provided, that whole mess inside his skull that didn’t click when he wasn’t going through the steps it knew from drill after drill, sergeant after sergeant. _I don’t remember anything after that, sir. Just that there was a thresher maw in front of us and shouting from the entire squad. I went for the nearest weapon, sir, but after that… It’s a blur. No, sir. Yes, sir. I understand that, sir._

Shepard cleared his throat and watched the drink he was holding change colors not because it could, but because the lighting in Purgatory was all over the map. Red, blue, orange, pink, then red again. And between all that, there was a lot of shadow.

‘Seems like you’re just wasting a good offer to me,’ Alenko said.

Shepard found himself eyeing that scar—because scars never lied. They told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them whoever was listening.

‘Guess I’m just stubborn, then,’ Shepard said.

‘Yeah.’ Alenko looked him up and down, from the buzz he still kept short to the torn pocket in his jacket, and when his eyes went lower Shepard felt them every inch of the way. ‘I can see that.’

‘I’m that easy to pin down, huh?’ Shepard asked.

Alenko reached for his glass. When he knocked his whiskey back in one fluid swallow, he showed off his throat—not a spot of stubble there, and the open collar showing off tan skin taut over his collarbone. And Shepard realized he was eyeing Alenko over, closer and for longer than he would’ve if he wasn’t at least interested in flirting back a little.

‘I don’t know about that yet,’ Alenko replied. ‘I only just met you.’

Shepard snorted—wondering if he sounded too close to the krogan for comfort. ‘On second thought, I’ll take that drink after all,’ he said.

‘No problem. I’ve… The offer wasn’t limited time only or anything. It’s still on.’ Alenko had the timing down just right, grabbing the krogan’s attention before he could move on to the next guys, and he was there holding Shepard’s brandy without missing a beat—brandy Shepard still didn’t know if he liked. ‘You’re here for the drinks more than you are for the music or the dancing, right?’

‘Do I look like I can dance?’ Shepard asked.

He turned at the wrong moment; they caught each other’s eyes and then, after a few seconds passed, they still hadn’t looked away. Alenko licked his bottom lip, something Shepard could barely see in his periphery, but all kinds of red warning lights were going off all the same.

‘Honestly?’ Alenko held his gaze; Shepard wasn’t sure if it was more about not wanting to back down or not wanting to look away. ‘I try not to judge a guy by his armor.’

‘You should,’ Shepard said. ‘Armor can say a lot.’

Armor could say too much—how long it’d been since you last put it on; what action it’d seen or what action it hadn’t. It was another honest thing because it had scars, too, a whole lot of them, and if it didn’t, you knew it was just for show.

‘Okay. I can see that.’ Alenko lifted his drink, like he was the one saying _I’ll drink to that_ instead. ‘But…nobody’s wearing armor right now, so…’

When Shepard rolled his shoulders, he heard the leather of his jacket creak. Alenko was right about one thing—but he wasn’t ever going to be right about keeping an open mind in regards to dancing. ‘You make a few good points, Alenko,’ Shepard said. ‘But don’t get cocky.’

‘You sound like a TO I used to have,’ Alenko replied.

That was because Shepard sounded like every TO _everybody_ used to have. But every TO wasn’t good enough. You had to be more than that.

‘I bet he was a real piece of work,’ Shepard said.

‘She was all right.’ Alenko clinked the edge of his glass against Shepard’s. ‘What are we drinking to?’

‘Not dancing.’ Shepard downed his without waiting and Alenko matched him, swallow for swallow, pace for pace.

Ten minutes later they found themselves a spot where the krogan—Alenko knew his name; when he said it, Shepard mentioned it sounded like something was stuck in his throat, and Alenko even chuckled in appreciation of the tired old joke—wasn’t watching out for them, keeping an eye on proceedings to know when to top up their drinks. And Alenko had Shepard’s back against the wall, kissing Shepard harder than he’d been kissed in a long time.

They’d passed across the dance floor, not really through it or a part of it, putting it behind them so they could get some air, some privacy. All those bodies got in the way but parted around them at the same time, like they weren’t there in any way that’d count.

A free couch at a table; under a staircase; around a corner—all with the illusion of nobody else being there but banking on the fact that they still were. That was what they needed.

It was the cheap brandy that turned time into something you could shove into a mass relay, something that moved too fast for the human brain to see it for what it was. When you were inside that speed, it almost felt like you weren’t moving at all. Shepard didn’t know how he’d wound up there but for a few dizzy seconds, after he closed his eyes, he felt like he could trust himself to fall.

  
  
ART BY TRILLIATH   


This guy, mostly a stranger, last name always—that was how you did it in Alliance—was holding Shepard up with a knee between his thighs, with one hand on his hip and the other on his face, a head for tactics. Divide and conquer; breaking Shepard down into parts instead of the sum they made. Shepard was hard in his jeans and harder when Alenko guided him against the friction. Heat; more heat. Alenko kissed his ear and then _bit_ his ear, pulling the lobe between his teeth.

That might’ve lasted forever. Alenko knew how to draw it out. Shepard tried to remember the last time he’d made a jump between systems but it got stuck like flesh in his mouth and he let it free from the base of his spine, where thoughts were shoved out of the way for more of that heat.

His shoulder blades rocked against the wall. Nothing his body couldn’t handle; nothing it hadn’t been trained to take. Sometimes, something too hard was just what a guy was looking for, or at least it was just what he needed.

Alenko’s fingers got under Shepard’s t-shirt, shaping the muscle, an old skin graft over an older scar.

‘Hey,’ he said, mouth on Shepard’s jaw. ‘You… You wanna get out of here?’

Alenko had no idea how much, but that was—like the krogan said—more of the type of philosophical thinking he could do without. Kaidan Alenko was the headbutt Shepard needed, his ribs so tight around his lungs it felt like maybe they had been broken, snapped by a krogan’s merciless skull.

It wasn’t such a bad feeling.

‘You have someplace in mind?’ Shepard asked, and Alenko chuckled again, this sound that’d always been breathless, looking at itself the whole time. It wasn’t shy; it was just self-aware. Alenko rubbed Shepard’s dick through his jeans, cupping it private and thoughtful and almost affectionate before he pulled back.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I do.’

*


	2. Chapter 2

The ride back to the someplace Alenko had in mind was…awkward, sure, but that was because there wasn’t any music playing in the back of the helicab—not to mention the driver up front who’d turn it into a show instead of an experience.

Funny how something didn’t seem like it needed to be private in front of a whole group of strangers, but when it was just one…

Shepard rubbed his thigh, wondering how long his erection would last like this, if it’d jump to attention again the second Alenko paid any attention to it. As for Alenko—he looked good in the nighttime lights of the Citadel, and that wasn’t just the brandy talking. The rest might’ve been, but Shepard didn’t mix drinks for just that reason, figuring out the right balance of sweet and sour, the ratios of this to that.

The sound of the engine quieting was one of those oxymorons Shepard couldn’t spend time thinking about. They’d pulled up in front of one of those new residential towers, usually called Something _Plaza_ or Whatever _Palace_. This one was called _The Clouds_ and Shepard reached for his card, but Alenko said, ‘I’ve got this.’

‘Seems like you’ve got everything,’ Shepard said.

Alenko swiped the card and waited for the beep to let them know they were in the clear, the doors hissing open on either side meaning the credits had been paid in full. ‘Maybe not everything.’

Shepard stepped out, still steady on his feet. The kind of training he’d had meant you could run after a shot of adrenaline _or_ a shot of morphine; both were intended to keep a guy vertical through pain his body didn’t know how to handle and wasn’t built to carry in the first place.

But limits weren’t for Alliance brass, even when they weren’t in uniform.

‘The name’s…not exactly the best thing going for it,’ Alenko said, coming up next to Shepard while the helicab sped off. ‘But you should see the view.’

‘Isn’t this a little fancy for a soldier?’ Shepard said.

‘Place belongs to my father, actually.’ Alenko let Shepard pass first through the heat-censored doors and into the lobby, but then he took the lead—nodding to the doorman, heading for the elevator. ‘But, uh, I’ve got the keycard for it, too, and clearance to use it whenever I want. After living in recruit barracks for a while, you realize how much you need some private space.’

Shepard couldn’t remember that ever happening to him. Having other bodies around was how he knew the day had started and his place now without them—way closer to lower level Citadel action, about a krogan charge’s distance from the Docking Bay—was _too_ private.

For a private, anyway.

Honestly, the twist the night’d taken involved too much talking. Conversation might make them familiar and then Alenko would be just another brother in arms, the memory of his thigh between Shepard’s tightening legs too distant to appreciate in the stupid, reckless way Shepard was meant to. Everything happening at once. Split-second decisions counting for everything that came after. No turning back.

They rode the elevator so high Shepard kept expecting his ears to pop but the air was pressurized just right—perfect calibrations—and they never did. When the light over the doors finally flashed and they rolled open, Shepard whistled, looking around.

‘Pretty impressive,’ he said.

‘It’s…something,’ Alenko agreed.

It had a view, the one Alenko’d mentioned. Shepard headed over to the window and looked out at all the bright lights glittering off each other and the conditioning dome covering this part of the Citadel. You never needed to sweat under your armor out there, or shiver while you waited for temperature regulations to kick on in your standard-issue suit. Bad things happened all the time but they weren’t big or loud and, for the most part, they stuck to the shadows.

‘I could take your jacket,’ Alenko offered.

‘I got it.’ Shepard shrugged out of it, leather as stiff as his muscles in the morning. He dropped it over the back of a couch that faced the full wall made of nothing but windows; there was a remote on the coffee table and Shepard figured that meant a projector screen rolled down over the view whenever you hit the right button. ‘I have to get something tonight, right?’

He looked up, Alenko on the other side of the couch, Shepard between him and tinted glass. A view of the Citadel, towers that glittered just as bright at night as they did during the day, and a couch that didn’t look as comfortable as it looked impressive. Expensive. Sleek.

‘That…depends on what you want, Shepard,’ Alenko said.

Shepard held onto a breath longer than he needed to. ‘You were right about the view,’ he replied finally. His shoulders weren’t straight; he wasn’t ready for inspection.

‘It’s even better in the bedroom.’ Alenko took off his jacket, folding it, neat and tidy and with regulation-timed precision. ‘You want something to drink?’

‘Yeah,’ Shepard said. ‘…Although something tells me you probably don’t have cheap brandy.’

Alenko poured him what he did have and it was steadying, enough that Shepard felt the warmth and the hum and the distance. He was high up, higher than usual, which either meant he’d done something right or there was farther to fall.

Alenko took the tumbler back and set it down on one of the counters. His fingers went for Shepard’s hand a second time and Shepard was still stiff—but also hard, and that made all the difference. He didn’t move smoothly after Alenko’s touch but he _did_ move, Alenko’s arm around his waist, something gravity and anti-gravity happening at the same time in Shepard’s stomach. It pulled and pushed and Shepard’s dick was about as trapped as Shepard usually felt, Alenko’s tongue getting his mouth open, running over his teeth, before he bit Shepard’s bottom lip, already kind of swollen.

‘You don’t look like the type,’ Shepard said, breathing hard. It wasn’t like shouting orders in the middle of a fracas.

‘Like what type?’ Alenko asked.

Shepard didn’t have an answer.

A _sir_ or two might not be such a bad thing right about then, Shepard thought, but Alenko had this look on his face like he didn’t need to say _bedroom_ for Shepard to get it was an order. Not just that; it was one Shepard wanted to follow.

He followed.

The bedroom was dark and there wasn’t a view, only a well-made bed and a few paintings Shepard couldn’t make out in the shadows. He wasn’t trying to. Alenko’s face was more the focus now but Shepard couldn’t make that out, either, while Alenko worked at Shepard’s belt, at his fly, inching Shepard’s jeans down over his hips. Shepard realized his palms were sweating, that his fingers weren’t doing anything at all. Unbuckling, unzipping, looking after all the setup and the prep-work that went into being even a half-decent CO.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said. ‘You wanna drop and give me twenty, soldier?’

Shepard felt an old arrhythmic punch slam into his ribcage, from the heart and from the gut. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, familiar words on his well-kissed mouth. Bruised and swollen, but not because he’d been sparring, or running a training course, or knocking heads with a renegade krogan while trying to calm him long enough to contain the chaos.

But following orders was following orders. Shepard didn’t have this course down yet and Alenko added, ‘On the bed, Shepard.’

He wasn’t barking commands, shouting them through the haze Shepard’s mind had become. His voice was rough, yeah, and deep, and sounded exactly like whiskey was supposed to taste, but it was easy. Firm, but he wasn’t too much of a ball-buster. It was a voice you could respect and respect was all it took to trust somebody.

Shepard turned around, the heat and pressure of Alenko’s body not on him anymore, which also meant it wasn’t there to hold him up. Shepard’s knees hit the edge of the mattress and he let them bend, because he’d said _yes, sir_ and that was an oath, a contract. It was a decision, too, just one he’d made a long time in the past.

The sheets smelled good. Shepard wrinkled them with his body as he moved forward on his hands, the thrill of something new—the first time your feet touched down on an unfamiliar planet, trying to adjust to the atmosphere, watching your own breath fog up the mouthpiece of your helmet. That breath didn’t last or even linger and Shepard felt the soft sheets under his palms, the cut of denim across the backs of his thighs, the pinch of it at his knees.

The bed shifted; it wasn’t Alenko moving after him but brushing against it. Watching, maybe, the idea like a sucker-punch, the kind that left you breathless and loving it. Not knowing what’d happen next—not being able to predict it but also not needing to be in control of it, because it was only one person the whole thing affected—had a sharp sting like pleasure. Like antiseptic on a fresh wound that needed more than a medkit, but a medkit was all you had to hand.

Shepard had patched himself up that way more often than not, face down in a ditch instead of face down on a bed. There were other guys who had it worse, who needed the professionals, and they were his responsibility. He always had them checked out first.

His stomach twitched under him. He couldn’t see a thing. That kind of darkness wasn’t anywhere close to the kind you could shine a light on, or shine a light through. Shepard took a breath, filling his lungs all the way to his gut, and that was when Alenko pulled Shepard’s jeans down to his knees and settled over his hips, balls heavy on the curve of Shepard’s ass.

Shepard waited. He wanted, too, dick trapped against black boxer-briefs and the sheets, but for some reason he didn’t start moving, using the mattress to his advantage or Alenko’s weight to his advantage. Or both; it was all about strategic use of available materials no matter what situation room you found yourself in. What you put over you, under you, to make it through the night.

That wasn’t where Shepard was now. Alenko touched him at the small of his back and pushed his t-shirt up his spine, with a hint of nails and callused fingertips. Used to handling weapons, strong and quick and, more importantly, _decisive_. Good qualities for a leader in the field.

He would’ve made a pretty decent CO. Shepard had only known a handful of those in his time; he was still young but there’d been a lot of COs.

Alenko’s thumb stilled over a scar Shepard didn’t exactly remember getting. He had shrapnel to thank, probably. Something broken, shattered, catching him as its last act and leaving its mark on the skin—the same way Alliance brass made its mark on the landscape of distant planets, system to system, craters and causeways and colonies.

The shape of the scar had never been obvious to Shepard, not until Alenko traced the whole thing out with the edge of his thumbnail. The skin around it was extra sensitive but the tissue itself didn’t, couldn’t feel a thing, not like the heaviness of Alenko’s body as it bore down, the squeeze of his thighs against Shepard’s sides, knees braced and flanking him.

‘You like that?’ Alenko asked.

Shepard’s _yeah_ was muffled against the sheets. Alenko didn’t push off of him to pull his boxers out of the way and Shepard didn’t know what was going on behind him, above him, nothing more than darkness and the clean smell of just-changed sheets. The kind of place you might want to be private in. The kind of place you might look forward to coming back to, early or late.

‘I’m taking off my briefs,’ Alenko said. How was hazy; why wasn’t specific but generally speaking, Shepard understood the basics. When Alenko resettled Shepard knew it was with bare legs, Alenko’s dick against his stomach—but what Shepard didn’t know was what it looked like.

_Yeah_ , Shepard repeated. He might as well have been a stranger to his own voice when he heard it. The word rolled off his tongue the way Alenko rolled against Shepard’s body, inching elastic down over Shepard’s sides until his ass—just his ass—was naked in the air. 

Shepard thought he heard Alenko chuckle, a laugh that might’ve been breathless—or it might’ve been wishful thinking. ‘Not bad,’ Alenko said, and if there was a smile in there somewhere, Shepard’s stomach was too hot to pick it out of the rest. As steady as it was raw, as gentle as it was appreciative. When Alenko palmed Shepard’s ass with both hands, giving the muscles a long squeeze, Shepard almost forget every rule of Alliance training to curse like a krogan. He held back, but he also held a fistful of pillow, and Alenko held two handfuls of Shepard’s ass, pushing it up, thumbs at the base between his legs.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said. ‘I’ve got this, all right?’

_Yes, sir._ Shepard’s knees dug into the mattress. There wasn’t a name for what he wanted—or how badly he wanted it.

‘I’ve got you,’ Alenko added, low over Shepard’s neck. His breath was hot, almost too hot. It was followed by his teeth and his tongue and the length of Shepard’s spine going down instead of going up, each scrape another gut punch, a length he’d never measured or bothered with measuring. Alenko paid attention to each vertebra, every bump and dip, the sweet spots and the scarred spots and the freckles in between.

Shepard knew there were freckles because Alenko stopped at each one, circling it with his tongue. And Shepard was so hard he was making a mess on his stomach, a mess on the sheets.

Alenko stopped when he landed between Shepard’s hips, above the curve of his ass. That was when the training kicked in and Shepard tensed, instinctively; Alenko tightened his hold, an answer to instinct. Shepard hadn’t thought of instinct as a question but maybe that was where some of his problems started rather than ended.

You couldn’t find a tough answer without getting a tough question.

But that was where everything slowed, almost like the end of the ride. Silence followed, Alenko’s breath skirting Shepard’s bare skin, every hair standing on end, Shepard’s dick twitching just like his thighs. Alenko’s lips were still parted but they had to be a centimeter above Shepard’s skin, no more and no less, not coming down for the landing Shepard kept expecting.

Alenko, Shepard realized, was planning on making him beg.

It wasn’t something he’d done, not even for his life, and _he_ wasn’t planning on starting. The wait might’ve felt like forever but that was just the adrenaline talking, the excitement, like holing up in a bunker before the enemy’s alpha team arrived—if you could win against your own head in that long moment then maybe, _maybe_ , you’d make it out of there alive.

Shepard could still hear those same orders barked out at him, while his armor was still polished, before his helmet had a chunk missing from the jaw and a crack splitting the visor. Before he had glass and blood in his eye, a piece lodged deep in his cheek, but he was better off than Martinez on the ground next to him, and whoever’d spilled the guts he was slipping on.

Shepard didn’t, couldn’t, close his eyes. Even if it’d help—that wasn’t how he was supposed to face a thing. A bad memory, a good one.

He’d turned his back on enough already.

Then Alenko ran his knuckles over the backs of Shepard’s thighs, all the way to the insides of his knees, before he headed up again, this time with his fingertips. He moved, settling between Shepard’s legs instead of over them, and spread them wide enough that Shepard realized he’d gone into this one blind, half-cocked, no backup and no one to radio. No foresight, either, and no planning—just a hot head and a hard dick and the way Alenko looked at him over his whiskey tumbler, the way Alenko pushed his tongue past Shepard’s lips and into his mouth.

The good feelings, which Shepard didn’t know how to weather -- they knocked him down all right, but they weren’t looking for a fight when he got up again.

Alenko’s thumbs were at the base of Shepard’s balls, sliding between and parting Shepard’s ass cheeks. That wasn’t a sentence Shepard thought he’d be thinking anytime soon—and he wasn’t exactly thinking it so much as he was feeling it, anyway. There was a tight ring of muscle and Alenko skirted around it, knuckling it, no lube or anything. It wasn’t being ridden, hard, just teased until _he_ was hard, Alenko easing back and telling Shepard, ‘On your knees.’

Shepard followed orders. He always did. He was up in no time, dick missing the pressure and bobbing free against his stomach instead. Moving like that pushed Alenko’s knuckles a little closer, a little more, just not close enough—with Alenko on his knees behind him, wrapping his free hand around Shepard’s dick. 

One hand behind and one hand in front, Shepard figured. He wasn’t complaining. Alenko was still using him for ballast and Shepard could hold his end, hold them up while Alenko held him.

Protect the guy behind you.

Stand for the guy in front.

_Take it, soldier. We made you for this._

Shepard remembered to breathe. That was starting to get buried under the other instincts and, for the most part, the good feelings, which were a hell of a lot heavier than a lean, quick guy like Kaidan. It wasn’t too long before Kaidan’s dick replaced his fingers but it was just there, sliding against Shepard’s ass, finding friction on his body instead of in it.

And there was his hand, too, with a touch just as slanted as his smile, a trick he pulled with his thumb and the slit of Shepard’s dick that left him begging.

He just wasn’t using his words to do it.

‘Not yet.’ Alenko squeezed Shepard’s balls, enough that Shepard listened, not so much that Shepard came. He walked the line between two extremes that Shepard never found, a balancing act that made what Shepard was holding up feel about as subtle as a krogan in a headbutting contest.

Shepard bowed his own head, staring down at his knuckles. No more bruises on them lately, just the shadow his shoulders threw over them. Alenko coaxed a few more sounds out of him, his fingertips as sticky as Shepard’s stomach below the navel.

‘Not yet,’ Alenko repeated. Each word hit Shepard harder than a krogan would’ve. Shepard held onto it, the good feeling that might never end, waiting for Alenko’s hips to rock his hips forward, for Alenko’s dick to give Shepard the rhythm it was looking for. If his arms gave out, Shepard realized, the elbow hooked around Shepard’s hips, both of Kaidan’s hands steadying him, would keep him from falling on his face.

Anyway, they were on a bed. It wouldn’t be so hard falling even if he did crash and burn. It could happen, especially when he finally came.

‘You’re pretty good at following orders,’ Alenko said.

_Pretty good won’t cut it, soldier. You’re Alliance now and if you don’t shape up, you ship out. Now drop and give me—_

‘Okay.’ Alenko’s voice was a kiss at Shepard’s shoulder, a tongue on one of Shepard’s freckles. Alenko’s hand around Shepard’s dick was a warm palm and skilled fingers. He rolled Shepard’s balls against his knuckles and let go and that was when Shepard came, on the edge of something close to a whimper, managing to hold himself up. ‘It’s okay,’ Alenko added. ‘Sometimes, to let go. It’s okay.’

Maybe he never really said it.

Shepard blinked, sweat in his eyes, t-shirt pushed up to his armpits, boxers pushed down to his thighs. Alenko’s face was pushed between his shoulder blades, mouthing something through the cotton, before he pulled away.

‘Hey,’ Shepard began, starting to turn around, to reach after him. Something mutual, his fingers cramping from clutching the sheets so tight for so long, but he was used to working through something like that. Each shot fired was one step closer to feeling numb and by then it was all muscle memory, reloading clips and aiming without thinking. That was what aim was in the first place.

‘Uh-uh.’ Alenko kept him steady, Shepard’s back against his belly, easing Shepard stomach first onto the bed. His dick was still hard between his ass cheeks. ‘I’ve got this.’

Just like the drink, Shepard thought, while Alenko rode him into noises that would’ve made Shepard hard again if he wasn’t so damn tired.

  
  
ART BY TRILLIATH   


*


	3. Chapter 3

Falling asleep after a one night stand… Shepard had never done that. It’d been a year and then some since the last time he’d gone home—a loose definition of ‘home,’ anyway—with a stranger and left before getting some shut-eye. Besides, turians weren’t exactly looking to cuddle. They weren’t looking to teach Shepard how to dance, either, since they had a natural sense of rhythm and those damn turian hips just about outdid everybody, sometimes including asari.

But Shepard must have fallen asleep because you couldn’t wake up unless you had, and before he knew it he was squinting against natural light, rolling onto his back, wrapped in unfamiliar sheets and unfamiliar smells and mostly tangled in his boxers.

_Well isn’t this a sight, soldier. Look at you, having the time of your life. Bet you’ll enjoy it twice as much when you’re doing laps at noon for an hour. Now get moving like there’s varren biting at your heels or so help me, there_ will _be. I’ll bring ‘em in myself and cover you in goddamn Tummy Tingling Tuchanka Sauce before I set ‘em loose, so kit up!_

Shepard chuckled, although it sounded more like a groan and dry as Tuchanka itself. He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand until he heard it squish—it always felt so good until the split-second it crossed over into too much and then it ached, vision blurring. Finally off his stomach, Shepard stared at the ceiling, a view he hadn’t known last night.

There was a skylight up there.

No wonder it was so damn bright.

Shepard squinted, covering his eyes with the inside of his elbow. He could still feel the sunlight on his skin even if it was filtered through the glass, the hum of air processing units loud enough to make for perfect white noise. From the angle of the natural light in the room, there was no arguing—he’d slept late.

It was the first time in so many years that’d happened, there wasn’t a point in keeping count.

Instincts. Memories. The one thing Shepard knew was that he was alone in the place—although he hadn’t been last night and he didn’t know how long it’d last.

Something about private, privates… Shepard shouldn’t have groaned like that. It was basic training. _Don’t make a sound until you’ve checked your surroundings. Know where you are before you decide what you’re going to do. Don’t fuck this one up, private._

There was a keycard on the bedside table. The art on the wall he hadn’t been able to make out in the darkness was of landscapes, earth vistas, pale colors that didn’t look like any place on the Citadel. Mountains, oceans, natural waterfront. Beaches with seashells. Shepard rolled his boxers over his hips and pulled his jeans on after, zipping the fly, covering up the mess underneath instead of cleaning it up. He reached for the keycard, flashing _spare_ at his touch.

There was another card underneath it—a basic data port, something Shepard could swipe through his omni-tool or a datapad and learn…something.

Whatever it was on the card.

He rubbed the back of his neck and high-tailed it out of the bedroom, following the smell of coffee. There was a pot of it, still hot, in the machine on the kitchen counter and it smelled better than what Shepard usually drank. A lot better. Folded on the countertop next to the fresh coffee was his jacket; a pre-recorded message in Alenko’s voice said he could help himself and stay as long as he liked. ‘If you want,’ the message ended, ‘you can take a shower. That’d be fine. Thanks for a… For a great night, Shepard.’

‘You too,’ Shepard said, the message cutting off. There was nobody to hear him, voice echoing through the kitchen.

He poured himself a mug of coffee—using a simple black cup, no Blasto logo on the side or Alliance symbol or vacation holograph or anything. All Shepard could see on the ceramic was his thumbprints where he’d been holding it, the handle against his palm, steam rising to his face. He didn’t mind drinking it black; the truth was, he enjoyed sugar and whatever condensed milk or cream substitute he could get, but he wasn’t poking through the cabinets and drawers for anything that wasn’t already out on the table.

Literally.

He swallowed fast, black and burning, until his head and throat were clear again. Or as close to those conditions as they got these days.

The coffee was too good for him. The view was too big, too much. Shepard stood in front of the window and looked down, all the way down, from so high anybody without Alliance training would’ve been dizzy to realize how far they were above the main level. In the distance he could see towers glinting like blue steel and, directly below, a tiered garden complex Shepard didn’t remember passing by in the night.

Obviously, he’d been paying more attention to how Alenko was sitting, where his thigh was, his hands, his body inside his clothes, the way he shifted on his side of the passenger seat and made the leather of Shepard’s jacket creak.

‘Yeah,’ Shepard said, voice echoing against the glass. ‘You were right about the view, I’ll give you that. It’s pretty decent.’

Nobody answered. He hadn’t been expecting anything more. With all the open space Shepard found himself marking where he’d duck for cover if he needed to, something to work on while he finished his coffee. Behind the couch wasn’t the best vantage point and it was too close to the windows; any sort of blowout would’ve sent glass shards deep into his skin because the couch was streamlined, not a high enough back. The best tactical position was probably holing up for a last stand in the kitchen. Shepard could’ve used the refrigerating unit to barricade the narrow entrance and angle a stainless steel bowl to get a good look at whoever was coming for him.

Shepard blinked. There was nothing but dark coffee grinds in the bottom of his mug but he couldn’t see them because the colors were too close for distinction. The kitchen was just the kitchen, empty like the cup in Shepard’s hands.

He didn’t know how to work the dishwasher. He stuck the mug in the sink instead and an auto-jet of water filled it right to the top; Shepard could see the coffee grinds floating on the surface—the ones that weren’t currently stuck in his molars, anyway.

The view was still there when he turned around, Citadel spires gleaming in the sunlight. It was one hell of a place—and hard to believe Purgatory was somewhere underneath when all that sky seemed bright and promising and endless.

Shepard shrugged into his jacket. He felt the data card and the spare keycard digging into his ass and he knew—because he had the experience when it came to marks and bruises—there were little round shadows on both sides of his hips from where Alenko’d held him tight, tight. They didn’t hurt. It was an unfamiliar reminder, almost a pleasant ache.

But then, ‘pleasant ache’ was something that didn’t exist. It was just Shepard’s brain, rattled around in his skull one time too many, pulling a fast one on him.

Better than a slow one. Not as good as the coffee. Shepard would’ve left a note but the terminal by the front door was password-protected so he stuffed the data card into his pocket and let himself out instead. When he tried to return the spare keycard in the lobby there was no luck on that front. The polite salarian doorman wasn’t taking it back, not for anything.

So Shepard kept it. Like a memento, like what some of the guys brought home with them from deployment on other planets—at least until Alliance started regulating undocumented imports, making sure they weren’t transporting anything that could harm the atmosphere or native life-forms, or upset the native ecosystem.

Shepard didn’t have an ecosystem to upset. His place by the Docking Bay wasn’t precarious for those reasons, because of those standards. Now and then he heard a gunfight down in the commons and imagined it was Blasto rounding up galactic criminals when it was probably nothing more than a volus, sky-high on Red Sand and thinking he was some kind of biotic god, or a krogan, who believed he was in love with an asari when really, it was just the pheromone thing. Then C-Sec rolled in to clean things up until the next time something went down and waste hit the air circulation vents: vigilante turians or biotics gone rogue or the occasional pissed off bounty-hunting batarian.

Shepard checked his message terminal. Nothing impressive to report and no news was good news—for the most part. When he sat down on his bed, no view from above or the sides, something pinched his ass. He fished the spare keycard out first, of course, and the data card second.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not.’

He swiped it. His omni-tool lit up around his arm and there it was, Kaidan Alenko, an address and a code to reach him at for future communications.

If Shepard wanted to call, of course. Apparently that was in his hands now that the mug of imported coffee wasn’t.

Shepard remembered the pre-recorded message, the pause that was almost like a hitch between words in the bedroom, whispered against a shoulder blade. _Thanks for a… For a great night, Shepard._

_You wanna drop and give me twenty, soldier?_

_I’ve got this._

_I’ve got you._

Shepard shifted. He needed a shower, to get away from Alenko’s face for a while and drown out the sound of his voice with the spray. The guy was clean-cut and wherever he’d been, whatever he’d seen, it wasn’t like the places Shepard saw when he closed his eyes, the ones he hadn’t come back from. He powered his omni-tool down and left it on the bed with his jeans, his boxers making it to the laundry—but only because he’d slap himself with latrine duty if he left dirty clothes all over the floor. All that meant was he’d be the one tripping over it, not his training partner, in the early morning when _Reveille_ started playing over the loudspeakers.

The alarm app on his omni-tool was one he’d also set to play _Reveille_ , the only thing that’d wake him and start the day out right, or at least alive.

Shepard stood in his t-shirt and socks, in the bathroom with the smallest shower on the Citadel, catching sight of himself in the full length mirror.

  
  
ART BY TRILLIATH   


There were the bruises on his ass, just like he’d known there were. The dry sweat, the places Alenko’d mouthed over, the lines he’d traced down Shepard’s spine—those weren’t there. Shepard had to remember them and with the shower, they’d disappear. With time, so would the bruises, only enough left behind for Shepard to fit his hand over the points of reference, his thumb where a thumb had been, forefinger and index fingers slotted on top of each other, knuckles curved.

His hands were bigger than Alenko’s but only by a little. The slight pressure felt good, calling Shepard back to the shower and the steam and his socks getting damp beneath his feet. Those had to be rolled off. Shepard pulled up his t-shirt next, seeing himself from the front and making a face.

A new view, and this one wasn’t half as nice as the one from Alenko’s place in _The Clouds_.

_Get in there, soldier. Don’t waste your rations. Pull your head out of the clouds and don’t get anybody on your team killed ‘cause you’re having the time of your life daydreaming. Say yes sir like you mean it, soldier._

Water ran down Shepard’s face, in his eyes, in his nose and his mouth. It wasn’t hot anymore and soon it was a notch under lukewarm, making the hair beneath his navel stand on end. When Shepard shut the stream off he leaned back against the tiles, sinking down, bad knee creaking as it bent, the fronts of his thighs tucked against his stomach. He couldn’t feel the cold metal on his neck, ball chain pinching his skin, flat rectangles over his chest—sticking instead of swinging, not from blood or sweat but from clean water.

Or at least, so the documentation on the complex said when Shepard signed the temporary lease.

Chances were it wasn’t clean at all. Chances were _nothing_ was. Shepard just felt wet, elbow braced on his good knee, fingertips dripping. When he thought about Alenko on top of him, how it felt to have no space between you and something, somebody else, his dick twitched half-heartedly.

‘That’s enough out of you,’ Shepard said. He didn’t have to think about elcor flirting or vorcha spitting to get it to calm down, but by the time he’d levered himself onto his feet with his palm braced against the slick wall, he was thinking about Alenko again.

Those bruises—they felt real. Shepard dried himself off without bothering to do a good job, still in front of the mirror, and when he rubbed terrycloth between his thighs it felt good. Rough like stubble, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

There was no saying rough couldn’t be just what the field nurse ordered.

Shepard’s omni-tool flared orange light on his face, making him squint, making him remember how much bad brandy he’d had the night before. It wasn’t too hard to copy Alenko’s address and send a new message with it, no subject line, a blank submission form only the final hurdle in a longer training course.

It was so simple even a varren could do it. Just type some words, thank him for his hospitality. Soldiers didn’t do subtle, though, and only some of them did flirting.

_With too much forethought—I had a great time last night_ , Shepard began.

_Without too much optimism—I hope you like elcor jokes._

_With necessary embarrassment—I don’t think I know how to write this message._

The last time he’d done the elcor thing was the night before deployment with the old squad, tossing out cards onto the table between them. The guys knew Shepard’s tricks—that his face was one of those honest soldier types and could sucker a stranger into losing all his credit chits in a single night—and also that he didn’t play it up too much, not even with the mercs who deserved it, trying to scam tourists in the Citadel Docking Bay.

Shepard deleted the three lines. Then, he retyped the first one.

_Call me, maybe_ , he added.

_Shepard._ No rank—and no first name.

*


	4. Chapter 4

Shepard was up at zero six-hundred. Push-ups came first and sit-ups second, then chin-ups on the bar in the closet he never had enough clothes to warrant hanging them up. There was sweat on his throat by the end and the pinched nerve in his lower back was giving him trouble again, as though old wounds never really healed after you’d patched them up. They did, obviously, and a soldier could get ten years, fifteen years, upwards of twenty out of a body that’d been on the operating table more times than not.

Something ached and then it stopped aching—or you got used to how it was, low-level pain that buzzed in the back of your mind whether you were down for the count or still on your feet.

That’d build character. Without pain, gain didn’t even exist. Shepard wiped the sweat off with a washcloth, splashed cold water on his face, shaved around one of his scars, and all before he checked his messages.

There was a reason for that. Most of being a good soldier was tricking the body with muscle memory, telling it to catch itself instead of being strung along by hope. Determination was the brand of hope that mattered, anyway. Gritting your teeth, putting your head down. _Getting through it._

_No man left behind._

Shepard blinked. There were a few new messages, most of them nothing to bother with, including an old one from Anderson he hadn’t checked yet. Just seeing his name there was all the reminder he needed. On top of the rest was an audio file from Alenko.

_Title_ : _Thinking about you, too._  

Shepard let the back of his head tap the wall, waiting on the bed while he downloaded it. He turned the volume on his omni-tool to low—then turned it up, hitting play, cheeks stinging from sweat and the razor’s edge and soap.

‘Hey, Shepard,’ the message began.

Just Alenko’s voice, no holo-images, but it fisted like a scar inside Shepard’s gut. He closed his eyes and, for a few seconds, it was dark enough in the room to feel like it was late at night instead of early in the morning. There were only a couple of hours between those two things, anyway, but they made all the difference.

‘I’m glad… No, hey, I’m really glad you contacted me. I don’t know what I was expecting last night, but… It definitely wasn’t that. And that’s a good thing. It’s good to remember there can be _nice_ surprises, too.’

There was a deep after-hours rasp at the edge of Alenko’s words that ran like calluses from the base of Shepard’s neck to the base of his spine. Then, it slipped under his skin, past blood and muscle and clean through bone. It was just a feeling, not one of the ones you could shake. It had Shepard in its crosshairs and he was ready, he thought, to be more than just target practice.

‘I liked the elcor joke, by the way. It was…unexpected, I guess. But then, we didn’t get much of a chance to talk. There’s a lot about both of us left to learn, and… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to getting a chance to learn some of it.’

_Yeah_. All right. Alenko was still talking, not against the point or around it but taking his time, setting it up like raw recruits put out the equipment for basic training every morning, then broke it down again at night. The blisters on Shepard’s palms and fingers had split back in those days, stinging when he wrapped them in medigel and bandages, then went right into unarmed combat training again. He’d been replacing his blood with sweat. If they couldn’t be tough as steel, as tough as turians, then they had to be hard as hell.

‘Anyway, I was thinking we might see each other again sometime. Nothing too formal. We could even meet up at Purgatory again if you wanted—although something tells me you aren’t too big on dancing.’

‘That’s pretty observant of you, Alenko,’ Shepard said into the long pause. ‘What was your first clue?’

Alenko chuckled, at himself and not at what Shepard was saying. Obviously. The conversation was only easy because it only had to be one-sided, and Alenko was carrying more than his fair share of the weight.

‘I want to see you again, Shepard.’ Alenko’s honesty made Shepard’s eyes open, fixing on the ceiling, a stain that didn’t make sense because of where it was located. ‘With, uh… With reserved anticipation: I hope I’m not coming on too strong. …All I’m saying is that it’d be a waste to miss this connection or lose momentum somewhere. I’ll talk to you soon—if I’m lucky.’

The line went dead almost right away, a shadow Shepard could only imagine passing over the private terminal when Alenko leaned forward to shut it off. Shepard tapped the back of his head against the wall a couple more times but it didn’t keep things from scrambling sideways—and it didn’t make him any less hard just thinking about Alenko’s hands on his back, either, or Alenko’s lips following his hands, the slide of his dick against Shepard’s ass.

Lucky, though. _Lucky_ was a tricky word and luck shouldn’t have factored in, not when there were years of training behind you. Emergency protocol drilled into the base of your skull to fix the cracks a few hard knocks had caused and upgraded weapons mastery every six months to make sure you could handle the latest tech. Pressure chambers and field testing and simulation room after simulation room so you’d always make the right decisions. So you’d make them count; so you’d make Alliance proud.

He’d never asked Anderson, _How the hell do you know whether or not you’re doing what you should?_

If you were lucky, you didn’t have to ask.

If you were lucky, you didn’t have to put on a uniform for a private security gig to pay the rent on a fifteen square feet Docking Bay motel complex ‘living’ space with mercs on one side and washed out Alliance brass on the other. Shepard figured he was somewhere between those categories, getting paid not on commission for his services but not dusting up every night so he could sleep through the long day, either.

The uniform covered up the bruises. Its collar was tight around the throat but then again, Alliance blues were the same way.

After that, armed with a private-license Kessler and a dinged nameplate on his chest, Shepard walked to the casino instead of catching a ride with another passenger headed the same wayHis feet were just fine; his legs weren’t busted. He passed the gardens, the clubs, the fancy restaurants, the old soldiers with asari on either arm, ask-and-answer VIs talking about upcoming holidays. Neon advertisements for somebody’s favorite shop on the Citadel. The swell of orchestral accompaniment whenever an Alliance promo flashed on a billboard like they were actually selling galactic freedom.

That music used to make Shepard’s chest feel full. Now all he felt were Alenko’s fingertips pushing against his hips, his palm cupping Shepard’s balls.

Thinking about that was better than thinking about working another long night on the slots-pachinko floor with Conrad Verner taking the east end, Shepard taking the west.

‘I held down the fort while I was waiting for your arrival on the scene, Commander,’ Verner said.

He was always calling Shepard that. After the seventh time correcting him during his first day on the new job, Shepard put it to rest.

‘Okay, Conrad,’ he said. ‘You go cover your territory—and don’t let anyone through with hot credit chits, all right?’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Verner replied. ‘Only in my worst nightmares!’

Shepard watched his hair disappear into the crowd. He watched the patrons come and go and wrestled a krogan off a feisty volus and sent a message through to the PR office about how the latter might’ve been using so maybe they should check that out. After that, the place was relatively quiet, unless you counted Verner chatting through the headpiece. ‘Possible situation at zero eight-hundred,’ Verner said.

‘Conrad,’ Shepard replied, ‘that’s one of the waitresses. She’s serving the guy a drink.’

‘Still.’ Verner cleared his throat. ‘It’s a _possible_ situation.’

‘I’ll keep my eye on it,’ Shepard said.

Another fifteen minutes passed. ‘You know, Commander,’ Verner added, always without warning, ‘I’ve got the perfect scheme to rob this place clean. …Which is exactly what I’d say if I was the scum we’re protecting this establishment from!’

‘Might not want to say that over the public commlink, Conrad,’ Shepard said.

It was one of those nights. Shepard wondered if he could’ve whipped a guy like Conrad into shape if there was a training field in the back instead of a break room, where Shepard took five minutes off instead of the fifteen he was allowed to clock in and out for. Part of that was because he didn’t need more, and part of that was because after five minutes Verner showed up.

‘Just heading off,’ Shepard said. ‘Can’t seem to get that timing right, can we?’

‘I’ll keep an eye on the break room in your absence, Commander.’ Verner saluted and Shepard’s eyes glazed over. ‘You cover my turf, soldier! Make Prothean Parlor proud!’

‘Aye, aye,’ Shepard said.

The words tasted worse than the free protein bars in the break room’s vending machine. Shepard was pretty sure they were from back before the First Contact War, hard enough to chip a tooth on them, but they were something to keep his mouth busy when Verner tried talking to him. For the rest of the night he split his focus between the floor and the asari dancing up on their daises.

It wasn’t Omega, that was for sure.

And it wasn’t a distant planet colony just starting up, making its decent living, not knowing what it’d see the next morning—if it ever did.

Shepard wasn’t tired when he got off, taking the back exit to avoid the Conrad Verner Mile, heading past the dumpsters and the neon patterns on the sidewalk. His footsteps didn’t make a sound, though he thought he could hear something digging through the trash. When he went to take a closer look, there wasn’t anything in there but the plastic bags ready to be hauled away for compaction and recycle. They’d turn old protein wrappers into rifle parts and all-terrain vehicle upholstery—but mostly just new protein wrappers.

Shepard’s place was dark, deep dark, like space travel wasn’t. There was always something bright to pierce that darkness or scatter it and those lights didn’t go out. Not all at once, not even after the occasional supernova.

Shepard had seen one of those, a view from a bridge on an early commission. ‘This your first time?’ Anderson asked, and when Shepard told him _yes, sir_ , he added, ‘Let’s hope it isn’t your last. Maybe you’ll make waves like that of your _own_ someday, private.’

Flat on his back, Shepard swiped the data card lying on his bedside storage unit—it was empty—and hit dial on his omni-tool _before_ he spent the night staring at the stain on the ceiling instead of getting some sleep. The plan was to leave a message, make a late-night elcor joke or two, and then not think about it. They could play phone tag for a while, like firing with rubber rounds in the dark: sometimes hitting _somebody_ , but mostly just losing ammo that didn’t mean anything in the first place.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said.

It wasn’t _Leave a message_ , an automated VI voice with hollow feedback, echoing on the other end of the line.

‘…Shepard,’ Alenko added. ‘You’re up pretty late.’

‘You, too,’ Shepard said.

‘Yeah. You know, I guess I am.’ The pause wasn’t even an awkward one, not in the usual sense, although it was still about tension and anticipation. Shepard wasn’t in control of that silence. Alenko was. ‘I’m glad you called, though. Might be enough to convince me I need to head to bed.’

‘Don’t let me keep you up,’ Shepard said.

Alenko’s chuckle was exactly what Shepard wanted to hear. Like medicine that stung, then cooled; like medigel that heated the skin over sore muscles, working long into the night. ‘Okay… But what if I wanted you to?’

‘Huh.’ It was Shepard’s turn to pause, although it felt more like riding a thresher maw, or the way Shepard used to drive behind the wheel of an all-terrain ground vehicle. ‘I guess that’d be a different story.’

‘I don’t mind staying up late,’ Alenko added. ‘For a good reason, anyway. You wanna tell me what you’re wearing?’

When Shepard chuckled, it sounded like an echo of Alenko’s laughter. ‘Uniform. Prothean Parlor and Pachinko Palace. Security detail standard, so… It’s blue. And something tells me I’m not describing it the way I should.’

‘There’s no should about it,’ Alenko said. ‘It doesn’t sound that bad.’

‘Then I’m definitely not describing it right,’ Shepard replied.

‘Maybe.’ Shepard pictured Alenko licking his lips, lying back in his bed, the sheets clean from what they’d made of them just last night. ‘Maybe it’s not that you’re the problem, but that you need to take it off. The uniform.’

‘You want me to do that?’ Shepard asked.

‘Put me on speaker,’ Alenko said. ‘I’ll be quiet. You won’t have to worry about the neighbors.’

Shepard hadn’t been worried about the neighbors. He put Alenko on speaker and put his omni-tool on the bedside table and then he hooked his thumb under the waistband of his Prothean Parlor pants.

‘If I can’t see you,’ Alenko added, ‘then I’m gonna have to hear you, Shepard.’

Shepard swallowed, somehow, even if it didn’t seem possible. A lot of things didn’t at first, but as long as a man had limits, he had limits to break. He rested—although it wasn’t restful—with his palm over his fly, his heels on the edge of the mattress, and thought some of the stupidest lines he could.

_With curiosity: what do you want me to say, exactly?_

The elcor thing’d run its course, though, and Shepard chose to put it away before Alenko terminated the call for both of them. ‘Okay,’ Shepard said instead. ‘Sure.’

It sounded like _sir_ with his throat as tight as it was, choking on another swallow because with each repetition, the doing got easier. No matter how old it was, a body could still learn that way. And there weren’t too many times it was easy, either.

‘Just taking off my pants,’ Shepard said. He could hear and feel his voice buzzing through his jaw and in his chest.

‘You can leave ‘em on,’ Alenko replied. ‘Around your knees, like last night.’

‘Yeah.’ Shepard’s third swallow, maybe closer to a gulp. ‘I can do that.’

The waistband stretched against the sides of his knees. There was a scar on the left kneecap, around and under, which Shepard couldn’t see and couldn’t feel. He knew it was there, and after last night, Alenko probably did too.

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe Shepard had spent so much time face down or on his knees that Alenko didn’t have a chance to know.

Shepard thought about mentioning it, then decided against it. He’d been quiet for a while, he realized, not doing anything, picturing a scar instead of touching himself, dick already twitching in his boxers.

_Effective communication, soldier. It’s the difference between tragedy and triumph. …Well, that and reinforcements actually making it on time, but since you can only count on one of those things, you’d damn well better communicate._

‘Boxers on or off?’ Shepard asked. He was already reaching for the elastic when he stopped, Alenko drawing a breath that reminded Shepard the most important part of communication wasn’t about saying your piece—it was about listening to what came before and especially what came after. His fingertips brushed his stomach and the hair shivered, his muscles tensing up.

‘On,’ Alenko replied. ‘Keep ‘em on.’

Shepard didn’t know if what he felt was disappointment or excitement, frustration or relief. It was the combination of two things that didn’t go together—like fear and adrenaline, only in the privacy of his own bedroom. The one narrow strip of window right at the ceiling let in neon city lights of all the businesses running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; one pale blue beam flashed over Shepard’s ankles before it faded.

It’d be back. Those things were timed and they came in rounds, like volleyed fire from an organized group of hostiles.

Shepard blinked but he made sure his eyes stayed open, wide open, and focused on the glow of his omni-tool instead of light coming from somewhere else.

It was all there, Shepard’s vision clear and steady, a target acquired, and the comfort in knowing it was something right in front of him, something he could name and see.

‘You still with me?’ Alenko asked.

‘I’m with you,’ Shepard replied.

‘You…thinking of touching yourself?’ Alenko waited for Shepard’s breath to snare in his throat like fatigues on barbed wire on the bootcamp training courses. It did. ‘And that…wasn’t so much a suggestion as it was encouragement.’

_Permission granted,_ more like. _Take five, then get your sorry ass back here, recruit._ Shepard tipped his head against the wall and lowered his hand against his dick, through the cotton, where it was hardening up.

‘C’mon, Shepard,’ Alenko said. ‘Talk to me.’

‘Not everybody has a voice like yours, Alenko.’ Shepard’s, for example, sounded rough and star-blown but not exactly sexy. If anything, it sounded like a tired soldier touching himself while a one-night stand was on the other end of the transmission, telling him exactly what to do. It’d make going out for dinner or lunch sometime pretty awkward, looking at each other over the table, every simple line—Alenko asking what the specials were, talking about the newest shops on the Citadel, asking Shepard what kind of music he listened to and if he was into that asari trance stuff, which Shepard wasn’t—reminding them of the time Alenko told Shepard to keep his boxers on while he touched himself.

That time Shepard did, _because_ Alenko had told him to.

‘A voice like mine?’ Alenko asked.

‘Yeah.’ Shepard ran his palm down to his balls, then worked his fingers and the damp cotton up to the head of his dick. ‘A voice like yours. It’s a pretty good one.’

‘Yours isn’t so bad, either. In fact, I’d like to hear more of it,’ Alenko said.

Hit the ground running, Shepard figured. Never look back. Don’t waste time getting in and getting out with worrying about what was coming up on you, over your shoulder. Right now Shepard’s back was braced against the wall, anyway. There was no chance of an ambush from behind in his blind spot. He was steady, with decent leverage, and the position was advantageous for getting a rhythm going. Orange burned into Shepard’s field of vision but it didn’t blur or swim. It kept its focus. Shepard kept his hand on his dick.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m touching myself.’

‘Yeah.’ Alenko’s chuckle made Shepard’s dick jump against his palm, already sticky at the head, through the thin fabric of his boxers. ‘Yeah, I… I got that.’

There was more to it than that. Shepard stroked the length, from the base to the head again, always in one direction. Up, but it still meant he had to go down first to make it happen. He tightened his grip.

‘Where,’ Alenko said, and Shepard felt that shock of heat, like a krogan charge or a biotic flare. Both, maybe, at the same time.

All the words Shepard had said, all the orders he’d barked out on the field, all the yes sirs and no sirs and understood sirs, weren’t the same as saying _My dick_ out loud, even without anybody else in the room. In fact, it left no room for anybody else, and Shepard’s fingers almost slipped.

He’d never lost his grip on anything. No matter how hard it got, he damn well held on—because there was always someone on the rung below, someone depending on him to pull them up.

But there wasn’t anybody else in the room, no room for anybody else.

‘Between my legs,’ Shepard said finally. It wasn’t a soldier thing, talking after curfew about the brass balls a guy had, like he’d been given a krogan quad instead of every other unlucky bastard’s two. Shepard never spent much time on those conversations anyway, elbow under his head, staring at the bunk above his, where he’d pinned up a few views of Omega at night, the tourist vistas they handed out on the Citadel, and even a wide open shot of another system’s stars.

He covered those up in the morning, taking them down and putting them under his pillow. That way, none of the guys had a reason to give him the nickname _starkid_ or whatever half-brained idea they’d come up with.

‘Take it slow,’ Alenko said. It was that place between a suggestion and an order. Like being told something wasn’t about how fast you did it or how well and more that you wanted to. Not exactly top priority in Alliance service—or service anywhere else. ‘Don’t go too fast. It’s late, yeah, but… This goes better if you get it right.’

Shepard’s throat was dry, the recycled air system in Prothean Parlor having something to do with that, and Alenko’s steady voice, his simple commands.

‘Taking it slow,’ Shepard replied. He could do that, thumb running up and down the vein, feeling it pulse hot with blood.

‘If you rub your thumb over the head,’ Alenko continued, low enough that he wasn’t about to wake the neighbors like he’d promised, ‘with the cotton of your briefs, it’ll feel pretty good.’

‘Yeah.’ Shepard let the word out on a sigh and let the sigh shift into a groan. There was nothing from the other end of the line, but there was also no way Alenko hadn’t heard him. ‘ _Yeah_ ,’ he repeated, and that silence made it easier to get into the feeling. He pushed his thumb into the slit and that would’ve been enough to make another guy curse. But Shepard just said _yeah_ again, legs splayed, warmth pumping through his thighs. It was like watching lightning strike during the sandstorms on Mars.

The first impact he’d ever felt from a live frag grenade going off nearby.

The dizziness and the echo in his ears, the way his heart starting pounding too fast for his body or for his brain.

But it kept him running.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said. ‘Don’t come yet.’

Shepard hadn’t realized how close he’d been until he stopped, pulling back hard enough that he could feel his molars grinding, like tires squealing into reverse along rocky terrain. He knew that feeling better than the rest, although his hands were on his dick instead of on a steering wheel.

The seconds ticked by. Sweat beaded on Shepard’s throat, at his temples. Alenko said his name three times, using his voice like it was an omni-blade, cutting Shepard open wider and wider with each repetition.

It was only a voice. Not even a TO or a CO speaking, either. Just man to man, and Shepard holding his dick. Hanging by a thread that was close to snapping, but as long as Shepard held on he kept thinking it’d hold.

‘Think about my hands,’ Alenko said, and then, ‘okay, Shepard.’

It wasn’t a question. Shepard was right on the edge and getting the green light sent him over, understanding only after he was falling that it was the opposite of holding on. It was letting go, and it felt amazing.

He could hear himself breathing at the end of it, which meant he was still alive. There were worse things than being killed, but not many. His heart-rate slowed with his hands, still holding himself, still wearing his boxers with his pants around his knees.

‘Was that your first time doing something like that?’ Alenko asked.

‘With somebody calling the shots on me,’ Shepard replied.

‘Huh.’ The silence, Shepard realized, was just as sexy as the sound of his voice. It was a part of his voice—the stops before the starts, and what followed after. ‘That was pretty good.’

‘Yeah,’ Shepard said. ‘It sure was.’

‘We can keep leaving each other messages from now on,’ Alenko added, ‘or you could… I don’t know, let me take you out to dinner sometime.’

‘I don’t know if you want that, Alenko.’ Shepard’s body was heavy, tired, but not in the regular way. It was good tired, comfortable tired, an ease and relaxation that had him sinking into the bed, into the pillow instead of the hard wall.

‘I think I do,’ Alenko said. ‘I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t. …It could be lunch, though.’

‘Just not breakfast?’ Shepard asked.

There was Alenko’s chuckle again. It was deep in Shepard’s veins but he didn’t want to get up, take a shower, try to burn it or scrub it off his skin. He’d do all that in the morning, after his exercises.

‘Dinner’s fine,’ Shepard said.

They settled on Friday night and Shepard didn’t know how to say goodbye, no _Hackett out_ or _over_ or _right away, sir_ to fold it up, messy or clean, and put it to rest.

‘Nice talking to you, Shepard,’ Alenko said.

‘Yeah,’ Shepard agreed. ‘The other stuff was good, too.’

He heard Alenko laugh, and then he heard the click ending the feed. Shepard watched his omni-tool glow for a few more seconds, then fade into power-save.

Then, all worn out, he fell asleep.

*


	5. Chapter 5

He didn’t have the bad dreams all the time and he hadn’t for the past two nights, one of those lucky runs that’d wind up making a guy feel even more unlucky by comparison. He did his pull-ups and splashed water on his face and checked his messages: six from Conrad that he deleted, one general Alliance bulletin, upgrade information and security sweeps for Prothean Parlor and Pachinko Palace that’d be taking place that day. That thing from Anderson. Something from Alenko with the subject _Thanks again_ and inside it told him _Shepard, a guy could get used to thanking you for a great night if you’re not careful._

‘I’m not careful,’ Shepard said. His voice echoed in the room and he shook his head at himself, washing up, suiting up, and finally heading out.

It was a nice day. It was always a nice day on the Citadel. C-Sec was all around, officers patrolling, tourists coming in through the Docking Bay, Shepard getting to work early.

The messages from Alenko got him through the night.

_Thinking about you._

_I’ll see you at eighteen hundred thirty on Friday—any food allergies I should know about?_

_Hey—call me later, when you’re off your shift but still in uniform._

Shepard called, the sound of Alenko’s voice reason enough to treat him like he was giving orders. ‘Hey,’ Alenko said, not tired but sleepy, and the distinction was what got Shepard off while Alenko told him, in no uncertain terms, to put two fingers in his ass, to touch his nipple the way Alenko’d done when they were together.

Shepard could still hear Alenko’s voice— _pinch it, Shepard, just a little_ —in the morning when his eyes opened, and he almost jerked himself off again before he stopped and took a cold shower instead.

He saved it for that night, waiting for Alenko’s message.

_Hey, Shepard. Call me. I’m waiting to hear from you._

‘Hey,’ Alenko said, for the second night in a row. ‘That was quick.’

Shepard didn’t say it— _I’ve been thinking about you. I’m hard already. I just want to hear your voice_.

‘You said call you,’ Shepard replied instead. ‘So, I called you.’

He waited for Alenko to call him a good soldier, but Kaidan just said he was glad. ‘I’m hard,’ he added, and Shepard let out the breath he’d known he was holding all along—because if he hadn’t known, he wouldn’t have been able to hold it.

‘See you tomorrow night,’ Alenko said, Shepard’s boxers around his thighs, the elastic pressing into his balls. The feeling was too tight but once Alenko hung up there was nothing, nobody, the empty room and the glow of the omni-tool always fading.

Shepard didn’t have a damn thing to wear to the place Alenko’d picked out. He had the night off from the Parlor—leaving it in Verner’s hands, and if he found out in the morning it’d burned down, or been robbed, or both at the same time, he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

He had a date with a guy he’d met in a club, a guy he’d gone home with about twenty minutes after they’d met, to a penthouse in the Presidium, reaching high into the sky.

There was no way in the Sol system it wasn’t going to be awkward when they saw each other. And if it wasn’t, somehow, then it’d sure as hell _get_ awkward when Shepard had no idea how to pronounce anything on the menu. He would’ve been happy with fishdogs and a Blasto movie, although picturing Alenko sitting in the theatre with his 4D glasses on and wearing something nice, a kid behind them spilling soda in his lap, Shepard figured that would’ve been awkward, too.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said.

Just like on the private calls, late at night—or early in the morning. Whichever way you came at it; it was always one or the other and you had to make that choice.

‘Hey,’ Shepard replied.

His dick did that thing, that Alenko thing, already trained to respond when Alenko’s voice came into play. Shepard’s ears were warm, but he shoved it down.

He was good at that.

‘I thought we could try out this new place on the second level,’ Alenko continued, already moving toward the escalators. ‘Nothing too fancy, but I hear they make a pretty decent steak sandwich.’

Steak. Shepard could handle steak. The worst it could do was be tough, and Shepard was good at tough, too.

Their table had a view. Their waitress had her eye on Alenko. Alenko had his eyes on Shepard over the menu; dark and interested. ‘What do you think, Shepard?’ he asked. ‘Maybe some lager to go with the sandwiches?’

‘Sounds fine to me,’ Shepard said. As long as he wasn’t the one being asked to pair the right vintage with the right meal, Shepard would’ve taken a batarian cocktail—which he’d sworn off of on Arcturus Station about five years back. ‘Didn’t think I was ready for Thessian cuisine just yet, did you, Alenko?’

They didn’t talk like that on the phone. Shepard watched a turian trying to flirt with a quarian and shook his head; he’d never get anywhere with her like that, and the fact that he kept trying made it painful to anybody on the outside.

‘You know, Shepard, I don’t think anyone’s ready for Thessian cuisine just yet,’ Alenko replied.

‘I don’t know…’ Shepard asked himself if the conversation would’ve been easier or harder to have if they were sparring, then figured if they were sparring the conversation wouldn’t have been happening at all. ‘I’ve known a couple of guys. Stomachs like a krogan’s. Could keep down anything you threw at ‘em—even batarian spices. Think they breathed fire a couple of times after, but we just used that for extra juice on the thrusters.’

And they’d died—all of them—back on Akuze.

Eight days and nine months ago.

‘That’s a good-looking sandwich,’ Shepard added. ‘Big, though.’

‘Biotic metabolism,’ Alenko said.

Easy, dropping it in there, something Shepard hadn’t known—he hadn’t tried.

There was the steak to worry about, the turian striking zero for the sixth time in a row, his friend checking out a drell walking across the commons below their balcony instead. Shepard wiped sauce off the corner of his mouth with his thumb and when he reached for his drink, he saw Alenko looking at him.

‘Something on my face?’ Shepard asked.

‘It’s the face I’m looking at,’ Alenko replied.

Shepard felt it: that hot little twist in his belly, Alenko’s knee bumping his under the table. Alenko’s hand followed, thumb sliding up the inseam of Shepard’s jeans before it was gone. Shepard took a drink, a long one, not sure if he liked the lager or not, definitely sure that he didn’t care.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Biotic, huh?’

‘L2 implants, actually.’ Alenko took a pull from his own lager, head tipped back, throat shaved, a hidden scar bobbing when he swallowed. ‘Not exactly the fewest side effects out there, but… Seemed like the benefits outweighed the drawbacks at the time.’

‘It always does,’ Shepard said.

Alenko kept his lip against the head of the bottle, condensation from his breath skirting the rim. ‘Yeah. It’s come in pretty useful, though, I’ve gotta say.’

‘Wish I’d had you on my squad for a few things,’ Shepard added. ‘Could’ve used an L2 biotic on a couple of missions.’

‘Thanks.’ Alenko’s smile was about as disarming as ever, the scar on his upper lip making it easy, comfortable—and totally out of Shepard’s league. It fit his voice, too, and Alenko licked his lips, making Shepard think about him licking other things. ‘Could’ve used a guy like you serving under me now and then, too. Still could.’

Shepard was the one who flagged them a helicab while Alenko paid the bill and left the tip, only this time Shepard managed to say ‘I’ve got this’ about the cab ride. He did, fishing his credit card out of his pocket, not standing close enough to Alenko on the ride up to his penthouse in _The Clouds_.

It was exactly the same as when Shepard had left it last time. Most things couldn’t claim that honor; they were scorched to the ground, barely more than rubble, when he put them behind him.

The view wasn’t the same, though—Shepard remembered it as being darker. But maybe it was the time, the angle, the day of the week. Maybe it was knowing Alenko was watching him making everything brighter, or how often Alenko’s voice chased him from night to morning.

‘I’m starting to think you only told me yes because of how much you like the view,’ Alenko said.

‘That’s part of it,’ Shepard replied.

Alenko was the one to cross the room, backing Shepard up against the couch and holding him there. Hips to hips, mouth to mouth—but like that suggestion, _don’t come until I tell you_ , he didn’t close the distance all the way. He waited until Shepard wanted it more than he’d wanted it when Alenko walked up behind him in front of Apollo’s Café, more than he’d wanted it on the phone the night before, more than he’d wanted it the first night—buzzed, with no clue what he was getting himself into.

The best times always happened around that feeling. The worst did, too.

‘Turn around, Shepard,’ Alenko said.

Shepard turned around. Once his palms were braced on the back of the couch, Alenko reached around him to undo his fly from behind, second by slow second. It left Shepard winded like a Tuchanka desert mile.

‘Just close your eyes.’ Alenko’s voice was closer than when it came from Shepard’s omni-tool speakers, nearer and clearer, and it went with warm breath on the back of Shepard’s neck, inching along his spine. Shepard closed his eyes and the view was exactly what he remembered, while Alenko didn’t have to work at all to make him hard.

Alenko’s hands, this time. It wasn’t Shepard touching himself. And it reminded him—with Alenko telling him what to do and how to do it—it hadn’t ever been his hands in the first place.

The differences were too subtle for a soldier like Shepard to work at untangling that mystery. He knew there were differences and he also knew how good Alenko’s hand felt, confident strokes pumping him right to the edge. Shepard’s arms held; Alenko’s grip held. And Shepard’s shoulders curved in around his bowed head, the darkness so complete he didn’t even see stars.

‘I’m gonna take you to bed,’ Alenko told him. ‘It’s not gonna happen like this—it’s not gonna happen here.’

Shepard wanted it to happen there. But what he needed…

Nobody’d taught him that on his hands and knees, locking his calves together to make push-up reps count for more each time.

‘Get in the bedroom, Shepard,’ Alenko said.

Shepard went ahead, but just because he’d pulled out in front didn’t mean it was Alenko who followed.

The bed was easier on his knees than the floor of his place, soft when he climbed up. ‘Hey,’ Alenko said, and Shepard was never going to be able to hear that word from him again without thinking of it like this. What Alenko said, right before he fucked him. ‘Show me what you did—the other night, when we were talking.’

‘Everything, huh?’ Shepard asked.

‘Yeah,’ Alenko replied. ‘Everything.’

The word stretched between them. It didn’t reach out to help Shepard turn around; he had to do that on his own, focusing on Alenko’s face in the shadows instead of the bright orange omni-tool glow on the bedside table. The angle was an adjustment and Shepard focused on that difference instead of how it felt to be watched. Every choice, every move, every strategy…

At least Alenko didn’t have a datapad in one hand, marking and grading, the list up before Shepard had time to change out of his practice armor—everybody filing in to see who’d wound up at the top of the class this time.

Shepard touched the waistband of his jeans. He tugged the button free and the jeans down to his knees, legs spread before he shifted forward. He kept his briefs on—until he tugged them down, too, the elastic settling tight under his balls, letting it rub his skin. Not like torture. Shepard wouldn’t think of calling it that.

_Seems crazy to do this now that we’re finally together_ , Shepard thought, only it didn’t seem crazy.

It wasn’t a waste of time and it wasn’t unfair that Shepard had to do all the work, or that Alenko wasn’t getting any of the pleasure. It didn’t shake down that way.

Shepard didn’t look up. He didn’t touch himself, either. He waited, just like he had the night before, for Alenko to give him the green light. So he could roll a nipple under one thumb and spread his legs with his other hand, just enough to touch his own ass and slip a finger between. Teasing, for a while. Reminding himself of the way Alenko’d done it, holding back for a reason Shepard didn’t need to understand.

‘Okay, Shepard,’ Alenko said.

Shepard’s dick twitched; there was no way Alenko didn’t see it. His nipple was hard before he even touched it but a few rolls between his fingertips made it harder, the sweat on his throat, Alenko’s eyes on his hands. If anything, all this stretching to reach places he’d never given much thought to before was going to keep him limber.

Now if only more training sessions could be like this one, Shepard thought, before a groan cut off all potential for thinking anymore.

‘How does it feel?’ Alenko asked.

‘Pretty damn good,’ Shepard replied.

He sounded like Alenko’s voice tasted sometimes, rasping but still holding strong. The way it came from a deeper place, letting off steam like an airlock finally hissing open on a decontamination chamber. After that, all you had to do was step out and breathe something a little closer to fresh air than the recycled stuff, high in oxygen, low on everything else.

‘Think it’d feel even better if it was you, though,’ Shepard added. Alenko didn’t say anything to that but Shepard stuck with the idea all the same, like he had been when he was only on a bed twice as small and ten times less comfortable.

Alenko at his back, pushing against him—not into him, not yet. Kisses along Shepard’s spine, fingers that weren’t Shepard’s rolling his balls, snapping the elastic, spreading his legs wider than they’d ever been.

Thinking about Alenko was getting to be a serious distraction, even if Shepard didn’t have much beyond a Pachinko Palace to be distracted from.

‘Hell,’ Shepard said. ‘Is there lube, or—’

‘I’ll do it,’ Alenko replied.

The words made Shepard’s gut twist like Alenko’s mouth when he smiled, just halfway, and Shepard always caught sight of it out of the corner his eye, never looking straight at it until it was gone.

‘Sure,’ Shepard said. ‘Okay.’

Down on his back, Alenko between his spread legs, finally pulling his boxers off the whole way. Shepard saw the skylight and the stars while Alenko only teased him, fingers slick and soft, with that hint of firearm-callus that drove Shepard crazy—more than all the gentle stuff did.

Maybe Shepard didn’t know who the hell he was. Maybe Akuze had taught him all the things he believed in weren’t true after all.

But maybe, without realizing it, he’d figured out what to want. Even a little bit of _how_ to want it, which had always been something different.

‘I’ve got you,’ Alenko said, bending over Shepard’s scarred knee, and kissing the part that wasn’t all torn up.

Then, he slid a finger inside him. Deep, and it was only one, crooked and twisting until Shepard came.

*


	6. Chapter 6

This time around, Shepard didn’t fall asleep right away. It wasn’t that he was uncomfortable, that his ass was sore, his muscles or the small of his back, the spot between the hips that, according to Anderson, went first on any soldier. ‘If he gets that far,’ Anderson had added, and it’d never been clear to Shepard if that was a blessing or a curse.

Just like the job, the life. Being a soldier. Nobody sat him down at the beginning and told him, _Private, this is going to be easy._ If they had, Shepard didn’t think he would’ve signed up.

_This is the hardest thing you can do,_ his first TO had said, marching down the line of raw recruits, who were dressed down in matching tanks and fatigues and standard-issue boots, some too big and some too tight. _But by the end of this, you’ll be ready or you’ll be dead. There is no in-between._

Alenko shifted next to him, enough movement that Shepard’s body tensed before he could control it. It happened sometimes without the distraction—in the middle of a dream, in the middle of the street, taking a shower or standing on the slots level, listening to the machines. The winners, but mostly the losers who outnumbered them.

And still, too many people to count showed up, because they thought the same way soldiers in the field did. _I can win this_.

Anything else killed you before you fired the first shot. You didn’t stand a chance without hope.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said.

It was the first time Shepard had seen his shirt untucked. The messy look wasn’t so bad on him. Shepard shifted his attention to the far wall instead.

‘Hey,’ Shepard replied.

They weren’t touching, but it must’ve been too easy to feel Shepard twitching, once, against the mattress. Some people called that good instincts, quick reflexes. Other people called it PTSD. It all depended on who you were asking.

‘That was pretty good,’ Shepard added.

‘That’s…usually my line,’ Alenko said. Shepard waited for him to chuckle and he did, just that much higher on the bed, with his back against the headboard. Having the high ground was the best advantage there was no matter what course you were running, from basic training to advanced, from simulation rooms to the actual field. It was the first thing every soldier learned—and usually the last thing he forgot.

And Shepard, on his back, dick soft against his hip, t-shirt pushed up to his armpits again, had almost forgotten his own name with Alenko’s hands on him. With Alenko’s inside of him, even, one small piece feeling so big.

‘Okay,’ Shepard said. ‘That was pretty damn good, then.’

‘Yeah.’ Alenko cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, it was.’

It sure wasn’t going out, grabbing a quick something at the fishdog place, seeing a movie together, bumping noses at the end of the night while figuring out whether or not they should kiss. It wasn’t even making awkward small-talk over the music at a club, shouting against the noise in a place like Purgatory. It wasn’t saying _I’ve got this_ about a helicab charge or paying for a couple of stiff drinks.

But all the things it wasn’t didn’t amount to explaining what it was.

Objectives. Mission goals. Acting orders, mostly.

‘I like the view in here,’ Shepard added.

‘Sunrise on the Citadel’s an incredible thing,’ Alenko said.

‘Where’d you learn how to do all this?’ Shepard asked. Dumb question, maybe, but Anderson liked to say the dumbest question of all was the one you didn’t ask.

‘I can get you the guidebook, if you want to take a look.’ Alenko didn’t chuckle; Shepard had no idea if he was kidding or not. He’d never played poker with the guy, after all—or served with him, under him or over him. Not in the way that held the most meaning.

You only knew a guy when you’d fought with him, for him and beside him. No matter how he stripped you down, if his voice could make you touch yourself over a private line, if he had you on your stomach while the weight of his balls settled over your ass—unless you’d seen how he kept his head in a hot situation, rounds blazing, you just didn’t know.

Shepard didn’t know a thing.

‘Hey—I was serious about the guidebook,’ Alenko said. ‘Comes in a helpful app, too. I could send it right to your terminal. You have the time for some light reading?’

‘Either you’ve got the best face for Skyllian Five I’ve ever seen and you could make a killing in Prothean Parlor,’ Shepard replied, ‘or you’re not actually messing with me.’

There it was—the chuckle. Shepard knew he kept gunning for it the same way he’d wanted Alenko’s fingers on his dick, the weight of his body pressing Shepard down into darkness. The chuckle, though… That brought him back up again, like pointing to a good thing and saying you’d been a part of it, helping to build something instead of busting it down when it came time to move on.

‘Hey now,’ Shepard said. ‘I was serious about your face.’

‘I’m— You know, I’m pretty serious about your face, too.’ Alenko looked down at him—and there was no focusing on the wall, on the view from the skylight, on anything above or below, anything that wasn’t Kaidan Alenko. ‘Although your face tends to be a little on the serious side without my help.’

‘Pretty serious, huh?’ Shepard asked.

Alenko was chuckled out, his _eyes_ serious, this deep dark color that Shepard only wished he saw before he fell asleep. Something a little less black than usual, or endless in the best way instead of the still-falling way.

‘Shepard…’ Alenko licked his lips. Shepard got the urge to follow the path they took with his own tongue but he held back, for all the reasons it didn’t make sense to be thinking that way in the first place. They had a good thing going on—it didn’t have a rank or a name or bootlaces it kept tied, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t as real as the next guy.

Shepard wasn’t about to ruin it by pillow-talking his way out of Kaidan Alenko’s bedroom.

‘Easier when I passed out on you after, right?’ he said.

‘Maybe.’ Alenko’s lips twisted around their scar. ‘But that doesn’t mean it was better then, either. Hard’s good.’

Hard was really good, Shepard thought. Something about his face—his serious face—must’ve let it show, without the edge Alenko had on him during a card game, and Alenko’s lips stayed twisted.

Yeah. Shepard _did_ want to lick them, the shape of the scar and the scrape of the stubble it interrupted, more like five am shadow than the stuff that showed up before dinner. Dark, rough, enough to leave some razor burn on Shepard’s stomach and thighs.

Shepard _was_ serious about Alenko’s face. But the time for saying that had passed, and there was no way of telling if it’d ever present itself again.

_Damn, soldier. You’re off your game—unless you’re taking that game part seriously. You think this is playtime at the asari daycare center? This is goddamn war!_

‘Hey,’ Alenko said again. Not exactly gentle, not like the way he’d touched Shepard’s scars by avoiding them. Going around the damaged flesh and skin, the knot of cartilage and the lump of bone, was just inverting the problem, shaping the old pain by showing all the things it hadn’t ruined and ignoring the things it did.

Then, Alenko’s hand was on Shepard’s chest, on his throat. It rested over the pulse just long enough to make it quicken before Alenko turned Shepard’s face to his. He licked Shepard’s lips instead, and then his tongue slipped between them, thrusting in before Shepard had the time to say _do it_.

‘Damn, you’re good at that,’ Shepard said.

‘Don’t sell yourself short either, Shepard.’ Alenko kept his mouth close, breath and teeth replacing the tip of his tongue. ‘One guy can’t be good at kissing all on his own.’

‘And even if he was, no one else’d know about it,’ Shepard replied.

His top lip almost bumped Alenko’s but not quite, and the space between was what made him feel like he was primed for another round, like there was still something hard and alive inside him, ready to go up in flames like a leaky fuel canister.

Alenko knew it. He had to, with his body that close, Shepard’s lips parted, each breath running a little quicker than the one before it.

Shepard didn’t even have time to think it was one hell of a dumb line because Alenko’s scar was twisting and he was kissing Shepard again, more tongue inside Shepard’s mouth, and Shepard enjoying—maybe too much—the way it shoved inside of him.

It wasn’t something he was supposed to swallow or choke down or even keep. It got into him and then it left him empty when it pulled out again, Shepard’s breath coming even quicker still.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Alenko said. ‘You were gonna say pretty damn good some more, weren’t you?’

‘If the blues fit,’ Shepard replied.

This wasn’t how he’d seen the night ending, Alenko’s hand on his chest, rubbing slow circles around one nipple, pinching it between the wrinkled cotton of Shepard’s t-shirt and two gun-rough fingertips, but when Shepard slept it was under heat and satisfaction, not asking himself if he’d wake up tomorrow alone.

*


	7. Chapter 7

He did.

There was nobody in the bed and no cards on the table, either. Shepard rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and cringed at the raw scrape of stubble on his cheek, all the way down to his jaw and chin. That stuff was rougher than scars. It couldn’t have been too nice for kissing—but Shepard wouldn’t have minded the opposite of a nice kiss, and neither did Alenko.

Obviously. 

He rinsed his mouth out, looking around the bathroom, at the deep-set tub with jets for temperature regulation and a shower that was close to the size of Shepard’s place all together. The towels were soft and they smelled pretty nice—and Shepard would never use them and be comfortable sweating into the terrycloth, rubbing them between his thighs and over his stomach.

He could picture a guy like Alenko using them, though. Lying back in the bath with his eyes shut, the hair at the back of his neck trailing in the water, or resting one palm against the opaque glass of the shower door, his head under the spray, his chest flushed…

‘Bathroom’s always been my favorite room in the place, too,’ Alenko said.

Shepard didn’t jump. Hell, if only on principle, Anderson had trained him to be a hundred times better than that. But when his pulse kicked up, he always heard incendiary rounds. Gunfire, explosions in the distance. He turned slowly, like he was about to dive for a weapon, but Alenko was in the doorway. He wasn’t armed.

‘My day off,’ he said. ‘And…I guess I figured I could stick around this time, find out how you take your coffee.’

‘Black,’ Shepard replied.

‘Okay.’ Alenko didn’t seem convinced—but then, Alenko never seemed like anything. And, somehow, that meant he _was_ a lot more than anyone else who was too busy seeming like something they weren’t. ‘If you say so. Though I’ve got a blend I think you’d like, and if it gets a hit of cream in there, it really puts it over the top.’

As wild as it had been with his hands on himself the night before, Alenko watching him from the high ground and Shepard enjoying every second of his own obvious disadvantages, this was even crazier. Standing in a guy’s bathroom, that guy standing across from him in the doorway, the smell of fresh soap in the air over the coffee from the kitchen, talking about _blends_.

This wasn’t Shepard.

But who Shepard was…

That guy wasn’t around anymore to make it as clear as it used to be.

Shepard ran his hand over his face, over his head, over his stubble at the back all the way to the nape of his neck. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it a shot.’

‘Unless you’re one of those soldiers who actually _likes_ drinking the jet fuel they serve you on commission,’ Alenko added.

When he turned around he let himself stay in the doorway—framed, so Shepard could get a good look, while Alenko was still too far away to touch. He had a great ass; Shepard had always known that, but for some reason the only time he’d had his hands on it was when they’d been kissing in Purgatory, and by now that felt like a lifetime ago.

Somebody else’s lifetime. The Shepard who was; the Shepard who wasn’t anymore.

Damn, but he needed that coffee Alenko was talking about.

The kitchen was the same; Alenko’s hair was the same. Alenko’s ass led Shepard between the counters and Shepard watched him, simple tee and tight jeans, reaching for the mugs on the top shelf. One black, one blue. The colors of a good bruise, Shepard thought, and took the black one when Alenko set the blue one down in front of him.

‘Go ahead,’ Shepard said. ‘With the cream too. I’m going all the way.’

He held the mug in one hand. Alenko poured the coffee. Shepard could feel the cup start to heat up, the steam rising, the ceramic sides getting as warm as his skin when Alenko touched him. Actions and reactions—there was no end to that pattern in the galaxy. Alenko stepped closer, reaching past Shepard for the can of fresh cream, imported stuff, smelling sweet even with a hint of spice beneath.

Then, he shifted, still standing close, his hip brushing Shepard’s as he poured himself some coffee.

‘I was thinking about last night,’ Alenko said, right as Shepard was about to take his first sip.

Maybe it was better that way.

If Alenko hadn’t stopped him, Shepard probably would’ve burned his tongue.

‘Hard not to think about it,’ he agreed.

Alenko’s chuckle, when it came, was hot like the coffee, warm like his hands, and rich as the taste. ‘Yeah. I can’t argue with you there. It’s not just something you put out of your mind once you know about it.’ He leaned his hip against the counter instead of against Shepard—and there was no reason to be disappointed, no room to think it should’ve been different because it was already, as they said, pretty damn good. ‘That’s why I was thinking there might be… Something more to this.’

‘Like coffee with cream?’ Shepard asked. ‘It’s not too bad, by the way. Not my style, but I could drink it again sometime. That’s all I’m saying.’

Alenko brought his mug to his lips, breath fogging the side, tongue darting against the rim. He had to be doing it on purpose, but when he drank, the intensity on his face was replaced with something simple—something more and less than pleasure. He was just a guy in a bright kitchen enjoying a cup of coffee he liked.

It didn’t have to be anything complicated.

Only, somewhere along the line, Shepard had burned his tongue. It messed with his tastebuds, but it’d heal quickly enough. In the meantime, he could appreciate drinking something that was hot in the morning, instead of lukewarm out of the vending machine on the third level of his complex, walking back up to level four with the recyclable hot-cup in his hand, nodding at the volus janitor on his way back inside.

‘Like another cup of coffee, maybe,’ Alenko said after swallowing. Shepard bet his lips tasted good but there was something that kept him from leaning across the distance—wanting to hear what those lips said before he sucked on the taste they were wearing. ‘…But maybe something more than that. Hard to believe as that is, there’s more than having coffee together the morning after. And if you don’t believe me, Shepard, I’d like to be the guy to show you.’

That got Shepard in the gut. Most things Alenko said did—although usually that was more because of what his voice sounded like when he said them, not because of the words on their own. This time was a mixed-up combination of both, swirling together like the cream in the black coffee, only it didn’t settle down when it was stirred.

‘Yeah?’ Shepard asked.

‘Yeah,’ Alenko said.

_Yeah_ instead of a _yes sir_. _Yeah_ like Alenko whispering it against Shepard’s throat the night before, lips closing over his pulse, leaving a mark Shepard caught that morning in the bathroom mirror. He knew it was there even now, how obvious it’d be to anyone who bothered to look.

And right now the only person who would was standing there in front of him, close enough that one bent knee would bring them together.

After that, there’d be no stopping the force of gravity, no pulling out of the mutual orbit they’d created. A closed system, too strong to ignore.

Shepard shook his head, shaking it off. They’d met in Purgatory. That was one step shy of meeting on Omega and everybody knew how long _those_ things lasted.

Until you left Omega, or until you died the same night. Both usually took about the same amount of time.

‘Credit for your thoughts, Shepard,’ Alenko said.

‘Coffee,’ Shepard replied. He paused. ‘…Pretty damn good coffee.’

Anybody else would’ve snorted, but Alenko shook his head instead, looking like he might actually think it was funny. Someday. When he had the perspective for it. ‘Fair enough.’ He took another sip of coffee—and Shepard realized it was close to drinking whiskey and brandy, overpriced alcohol a krogan watered down to turn a better profit. Once you landed in Purgatory, you never got out of it again. Especially not when you were still on the Citadel. ‘After the coffee, though, I was thinking…’

Shepard waited. Dinner, movie, secret Blasto plans, getting married on Omega while they were so far from sober they might as well have been in another system—maybe Alenko was going to try springing that whole dancing idea on Shepard again and be disappointed when Shepard stood firm, and Shepard was going to take the long walk of shame back to the Docking Bay, listening to the old mercs talk shit while they pretended they weren’t cheating at Skyllian Five.

Hey, it was one way to pass the time.

‘Credit for your thoughts, Alenko,’ Shepard said.

Alenko moved closer, his hips against Shepard’s hips; Shepard could feel the length of his thigh, a tight muscle, the swell of his stomach when he breathed in, the smell of the coffee on his mouth and on his skin. He was close, cream and caffeine and everything, and Shepard straightened even as the small of his back, the curve of his ass, pressed into the edge of the counter.

‘I read you loud and clear, Alenko,’ Shepard said. ‘Cutting chatter down. Keeping a low profile. Waiting for the next command.’

Alenko shook his head, chuckling as he pulled away. ‘C’mon. Let’s… Let’s finish our coffee in the living room before it gets too cold.’

Shepard could drink to that, he thought, although he wasn’t messing around with a krogan bartender. It was Alenko serving the drinks, a couch that was comfortable, a view that wasn’t. But at the same time, it wasn’t supposed to be.

Shepard crossed one leg over the other, then uncrossed it. Nobody’d said _at ease, soldier._

‘I know, I know,’ Alenko said. ‘It’s an old couch. I don’t spend enough time up here to get it replaced, but I kind of want to tie you up on it anyway.’

Shepard blinked. Some of the coffee went down the wrong way and then he was coughing, Alenko clapping him on the back, even going so far as to look concerned.

‘This coffee might be too rich for my blood, Alenko,’ Shepard said, once he could, hoping to hell his ears weren’t turning pink, or worse—his cheeks. Usually it was just the ears, but Alenko had that kind of impact on a guy. You never could tell what was going to happen to you next.

‘So long as it’s just the coffee,’ Alenko replied.

Shepard had to think about it. ‘You’re not talking batarian slave bondage here, are you?’ he asked finally, and Alenko looked about as bewildered by the idea as he was amused. ‘…Okay. Guess that was a dumbass question.’

‘No question’s a dumb question,’ Alenko said. ‘Except the one you don’t ask.’

Shepard stared down into his coffee. ‘Yeah. So I hear.’

‘It wouldn’t come without stipulations,’ Alenko added. ‘You’d feel safe. That’s… That’s kind of the most important part.’

_I don’t ever feel safe, Alenko_ , Shepard thought.

‘Sounds like there really is a guidebook,’ he said instead.

Alenko cleared his throat. ‘Actually… There is. And like I said, I could send it to you—if you’re interested.’

Shepard was interested. The batarian thing had only been half a joke and half serious, unlike Alenko, who was all serious, and the way his eyes looked because of being so serious made Shepard feel like he was still choking on coffee. Like more than just the drink was too rich for his blood—only that got his blood hot, pumping, determined to prove the feeling wrong until he pushed it back over its edge of the line.

‘I’ll give it a shot,’ Shepard said. ‘And, hey, if you want to get all batarian slave bondage on me…’

‘You’ve been watching too many Blasto rip-offs, Shepard,’ Alenko replied. ‘I’ll send you the information. You can look it over and call me—if you’re interested. Some people have different tastes, that’s all.’

Shepard’s mug was finally empty. It’d been on half-empty for a long time, it felt like, until suddenly he’d swallowed everything. ‘Yeah. Sure. Some people like good coffee and other people don’t.’ The grin Shepard went after turned into a scar, like the lumpy cartilage on his knee and the knotted flesh with the long, red hook of raised flesh. ‘I’ll check it out, then.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ Alenko said. His trick was making it sound like he really meant it.

Shepard put the mug in the dishwasher and put his jeans on with Alenko watching. He shrugged into his t-shirt and grabbed for his leather jacket and Alenko was _still_ watching, and Shepard didn’t even hate the feeling. He didn’t put on a show exactly, flipping up the collar before stopping—and letting Alenko in too close when Shepard reached the door.

‘Hope I’ll be seeing you, Shepard.’ Alenko’s lips rested against Shepard’s ear, tucked behind the shell, smooth cheek on Shepard’s rough buzz-cut and hot breath tickling almost as much as when Alenko blinked. ‘Just…give me a call if you want to, all right?’

‘Sure,’ Shepard said.

Outside in the hall he didn’t pick up his pace. He’d been in enough awkward elevator rides not to fidget. He _was_ taking that Presidium Commons walk of shame, never able to tell which flowers were fake and which ones were really in season, but there wasn’t much shame in it. There was anticipation, hotter than fresh coffee, the idea that Alenko was going to send him something, and it was going to change _everything_.

And Shepard wasn’t much of a file-a-report guy. He could do it, and he had, but sitting down to proofread somebody else’s work always had his eyes glazing over.

Instructional videos.

Now there was the best thing modern tech had ever devised, more than the digital flowerbeds that didn’t smell like flowers. They looked good and tourists snapped plenty of pictures with them, but the whole look-and-don’t-touch policy kept anyone from finding out the truth: what they could connect with; what their hand would pass straight through if they reached out to break the rules.

Shepard was officially looking at and thinking about the Presidium flowers. He needed a cold shower and a dry protein snack, doing his chin-ups on the bar in the closet, getting the routine down so he could read his latest message with a clear head and an eye primed for detail.

His arms were sore when he was done; he’d upped the reps by twenty and he’d be feeling it even more tomorrow. But something had to cut through what Shepard predicted and built, sitting on the edge of the bed, omni-tool on.

He was getting used to keeping it on the bedside table instead. He liked leaving it under the lamp, which didn’t need to be switched on when the omni-tool was glowing, orange light on Shepard’s face and in his eyes.

‘Time to catch up on my reading,’ Shepard said.

He needed to get some fish or something, liven the place up a little. It might just make it seem like he had some reason to talk when there was nobody else in the room.

_Title: That message I promised you_

Shepard opened it, rested his elbow on his good knee, and stretched the bad one out. It was almost easy, which meant it was second nature to him now.

Then, he learned way more bullet points about Total Power Exchange and negotiations than there were types of firearms in the Sol system.

It was just like learning about tactics during raw recruit training. Lists of names, descriptions, definitions, terminology you’d never heard before. All of them were words you wouldn’t think about again; they’d be a part of your blood once you got out there on the field or you’d be spilling blood instead, unless you were lucky, and only got yourself vaporized.

Hard limits. Soft limits. Requirement limits.

So where, Shepard wondered, was the option for _no limits_?

It wasn’t even in the fine print.

Health concerns. Safety measures. Safe words.

It’d take an Alliance-trained mind to keep all that stuff straight at the same time. If there were practice drills, maybe Shepard could see himself—down on the floor, doing push-ups while Alenko shouted a definition and Shepard gave him the name. They’d keep at it until Shepard knew it backwards and forwards and better than the shape of his own face in the mirror, which he didn’t look at too much anymore.

Guidebooks, rules, _hard limits_ —there’d never been anything in Alliance required reading that’d made Shepard’s dick twitch. But when he got to types of play, Shepard could remember Alenko saying he wanted to tie him up on the couch. He remembered the view of the Citadel, how they could almost see everything but none of it could see them back. It was the perfect vantage point and it wasn’t about vantage points because… Hell, it could afford to be. It had that luxury.

There was even a fountain on one wall of the living room, something Shepard hadn’t seen anywhere other than a superior’s office during a critical mission briefing. The sound of the water, soothing and cool, behind the orders Shepard was paying close attention to.

_Don’t fuck this one up, soldier._

Sometimes, the voice he heard wasn’t anybody else’s. It was his own. When he switched his focus to the memory of Alenko’s voice instead— _I kind of want to tie you up on it anyway_ —his heart rate calmed before it sped up again, with a rhythm and everything. Like going from a slower song to a faster one on the dance floor, not that Shepard did anything but strike out on either.

_I kind of want to tie you up on it anyway_.

It hit Shepard a second time, lower, below the belt, Shepard thinking about taking it off. Thinking about Alenko taking it off. Thinking about Alenko tying him up with it after, Alliance standard knots and everything, Shepard’s arms behind his back.

If he’d be on his knees, on his stomach, his shoulders bare to the ceiling or pressed against the hard arm of the couch. Not the most comfortable, but Alenko wanted to tie him up on it anyway.

Kind of.

Shepard wanted to be tied up on it anyway—also kind of—except trying to piece together the logistics, the exact positions, without a frame of reference was no walk through the Commons. It was a narrow back-alley in the Docking Bay, the type with batarian tattoo parlors through every smoky door, with ships landing and credit bribes exchanging terminals so somebody’d look the other way of forged passes.

That was C-Sec’s business, not Alliance’s. Now, if any of those sons-of-bitches came to Prothean Palace looking to turn a profit on stolen chits—then, Shepard could take care of the problem. Or throw Verner at it. Whichever had more of a chance to stick.

There was sweat on the back of Shepard’s neck. The air conditioning unit was busted again and Shepard headed out into the hall to get the keys from the landlord and a coffee from the machine, then let himself into the power room to clean out the vents.

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Shepard said when he was finished, wiping something pink and sticky off his arms. ‘Looks to me like a hanar’s living in that thing. You don’t do a full sweep of the system…’

_I guess I’ll have to go down there every other week like I do for free already._

‘Anyway, it’s pink and sticky,’ Shepard said. ‘And if I get a rash from it, you’re paying the medical bills.’

‘Pension’ll cover it,’ the volus replied. He had a look in his eyes like he’d been spending the weekend with some Red Sand; he’d be trying to tackle Shepard any second.

‘I’m not retired just yet,’ Shepard said.

‘I am a biotic _god_ ,’ the volus shouted after him.

Shepard let himself back into his bunker with a _Me too, buddy_ , taking off his boots like he was still in training barracks, letting them rest side by side next to one leg of his bed. He thought about calling Alenko, saying ‘What’s pink and sticky and wants you to tie him up?’ instead of hello, but that was beyond the elcor jokes and into something else—something without a contingency plan for when Alenko cut the feed and blocked Shepard’s incoming number.

Shepard was pink. He was sticky. He did want Alenko to tie him up on the couch.

In fact, it was too close to the truth.

Shepard washed his arms off instead, watching the pink stuff clog up the drain. He just had to hope it was hanar tentacle, not hanar juices. Maybe somebody’d dropped an energy drink down one of the open grates. It came off clean and there was no sign of discoloration underneath and Shepard thought of a few more ways to start up the conversation with Alenko.

_Good news—I don’t have a serious rash._

_How come there’s nothing on this list about tentacles?_

_So long as you don’t ask me to play Who’s the Naughty Salarian, I’m in._

It wasn’t easy, but Shepard replaced those thoughts with _No limits_.

That was the plan, anyway.

He knew how fast those could go haywire—if you gave them the chance to get away from you. _Thanks for the bedtime reading,_ he wrote back. _I’ll go over everything again tonight after lights out, see if I can’t get in the mood for the subject matter._

Nobody was there to tell him it sounded half-brained, like a krogan who’d scrambled his neurons with one too many headbutts. You saw them sometimes in the Docking Bay, waiting to get hired onto a team for cheap, the guys they worked with cheating them after using them for moving shields and easy muscle, at least comparatively.

Alliance never did anything like that. Not by the books.

Shepard hit send.

Then, he got ready for work, to spend most of his night a place where nobody knew his name—even with it pinned to his chest—much less the secret he was keeping.

All tied up and waiting for him on Alenko’s couch.

*


	8. Chapter 8

He had a dream about it, arms pinned behind his back, something heavy weighing him down. It started off the way a good dream should—until Shepard realized he was under part of a Kodiak shuttle, arms pinned by the rubble, that something heavy enough to crush him flat. _Get up, soldier_ , he heard somebody shouting. _Get up and give them hell, unless hell’s where you want to go._

Shepard stared at the ceiling for a long time, although it probably wasn’t as long as it felt. He rolled over onto his stomach, face pushed into his pillow, smelling his own stale sweat on the cotton.

Then, before he swung his feet onto the floor and headed into steady breathing for his chin-ups, he checked his omni-tool messages.

_Title: Safe, Sane and Consensual_

‘I’m only one of those things, Alenko,’ Shepard muttered into his forearm. ‘And it’s not the first two.’

_That’s the most important part. Something to keep in mind, anyway. We can talk about the contract in person—unless the idea of that makes you uncomfortable._

‘Well, it might just make me distracted,’ Shepard said.

Like that wasn’t a problem already.

It was Alenko’s mouth on his skin, Alenko’s hands on his hips, Alenko’s eyes everywhere else—watching him the way Shepard was expecting to be touched. And it was the way those things crept into the rest of Shepard’s life, changing the heat in his gut whenever he thought about them.

Panic and adrenaline were supposed to come hand in hand but this time it wasn’t about panic or keeping his head clear. It was about Alenko and this possibility that made too much sense and no sense at the same time.

How had Shepard gotten this far out of his regulation zoning?

By losing it on Akuze, first of all. By not being able to get it back. By going to places like Purgatory and accepting free drinks from handsome strangers who had Presidium penthouses—and knew just what to do to make Shepard’s body coil like a chain reaction or an engine core, one of those snap and stick warming pads they kept under their armor for below-zero missions.

_See you tonight?_ Shepard wrote.

Alenko’s reply came fast. _Sure. You can come by as late as you need._

But it was Shepard’s night off, the worst night of the week. He showed up at eleven after killing two hours in Purgatory, watching the turians and the asari dance together. They made it look so easy—or maybe they just didn’t care that it was hard, that they didn’t fit together.

When Shepard had gone out with the guys, he was the same way. And the short-frame vid that made the rounds of him dancing his ass off like a kid during a galaxy-wide holiday—that made him chuckle just as much as the next recruit.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said, letting him in after a long elevator ride, staying close but not too close. Their hips skimmed the air instead of each other and it was _not_ touching that made Shepard think of the couch, and also made him feel like he’d been tied up already.

‘Krogan’s got the night shift on Wednesdays,’ Shepard explained. ‘Place might end up phasing me out if he doesn’t get skull-cracking happy.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ Alenko said.

Shepard shrugged, keeping his jacket on, still moving through the place like he needed stealth systems to trick the furniture into believing he belonged there. ‘Keeps you on your toes, anyway.’

‘And…not on your back.’ Alenko was waiting when Shepard turned. ‘…Or on your stomach. You know, that— It seemed like a good straight line at the time.’

‘Only reason I’m not laughing is ‘cause I’m thinking about it,’ Shepard said. Well, it wasn’t the only reason. There was the other thing: that Shepard didn’t laugh much for any reason, even when the joke was funny. Even when he wanted to. The part he needed for that was old, which meant it could get rusty, snowed over like a crash site on Noveria. ‘That’s not going to be on the contract, is it? That I have to laugh at all your jokes?’

Alenko, on the other hand, was still able to laugh—and Shepard kept searching it out the way a varren sniffed after blood on the ground. ‘Not unless you want it to be,’ he said. ‘That’s something we’ll come up with together. What you’re looking for; what your limits are.’

‘No limits.’ Shepard wasn’t expecting Alenko to look surprised—so that probably made two of them. ‘I looked it up,’ he explained, both of them still ranging around each other, testing the ground and the balance while trying to figure out who was going to make the first move. Shepard thought again how he wouldn’t have minded if Alenko’d served on the same squad with him—under him, over him in rank, wherever. He had a clear head for this, though obviously, it was better he hadn’t been anywhere near Akuze.

Nine months and…

Shepard had lost tracking of the exact number of days. He knew exactly how many it’d been since he met Kaidan, and if he could trace that back, then…

Alenko’s second chuckle snapped his attention into place like a bungee cord going taut after a training jump.

‘Don’t tell me.’ Shepard felt the leather of his jacket creak, like old joints—or old wounds. ‘That’s what all the rookies say.’

‘And I’m guessing it’s been a while since you were in the position of being a raw recruit,’ Alenko added. ‘But…yeah. That _is_ what the rookies say.’

‘Are all the rookies like me?’ Shepard asked.

Alenko met his eyes—their first contact of the night, Shepard realized. ‘Nobody’s like you, Shepard,’ Alenko said.

‘Yeah, well.’ Shepard cleared his throat. ‘Lucky for them.’

He hadn’t signed a contract when he enlisted—he’d just signed up. His name was still out there, John Shepard, and kept on digital file, with INACTIVE flagged red and steady.

Showed what Alliance knew. He was looking to be pretty active pretty soon.

‘Okay,’ Shepard added. ‘No batarian slave bondage. _That’s_ my limit.’

‘Your hard limit?’ Alenko went for a datapad, pulling a chair up for himself at the kitchen table like they were about to sit down to dinner. ‘Okay. See, now that’s a start.’

‘Do I get to know yours, or is that not a part of the…’ Shepard had to cough again. ‘Contract.’

Some words just stuck when a guy tried to swallow. Like _mission failure_ and _killed in action._ Usually they showed up together like that, but _contract_ was another one, slipping down the back of Shepard’s throat and getting caught there like a stale chunk of dehydrated protein.

‘Yeah,’ Alenko said. ‘You do, Shepard. We both get to see it—we both get to see everything.’

‘That’s kind of like doing the elcor thing, isn’t it?’ Shepard folded his arms over his chest even if he didn’t lean back on the arm of the couch. No matter how long he waited for _at ease, soldier_ he didn’t know if he’d get it, the voice telling him it was time to relax actually telling him how relaxing worked. ‘With honest emotion: it’s not my thing when anybody goes batarian on me.’

‘With complete approval: I’m with you on that one,’ Alenko replied.

‘Good to know we’re on the same line.’ Finally, Shepard rested his weight—only enough of it that he could move again fast if he had to—against the side of the couch. Alenko rubbed the bridge of his nose, typing something down on the pad. ‘…You’re not really putting that down in writing, are you?’

‘It’s part of the contract. Under hard limits.’ Alenko turned the datapad around. ‘You wanna check to make sure it’s gonna be clear enough?’

Alliance brass didn’t say _uh_. They didn’t stutter. The only time they choked was when it was on hazardous air conditions, filtration systems broken.

‘You’re being thorough,’ Shepard said, pushing off the couch to stand closer. Then, because being above Alenko didn’t make sense, he pulled out a chair.

‘Yeah,’ Alenko said. ‘This might be more comfortable if we’re both sitting down.’

There it was, plain as day, in its own entry on Alenko’s datapad. _Hard limits: batarian slave bondage_. When Shepard got the urge to laugh this time he actually chuckled, before it turned into a cough and ducked back under cover.

This was serious stuff. He was taking it seriously. And the electric charge pumping like heat lightning in his chest was a side effect that came with charting a course through brand new territory.

_If you don’t enjoy it just a little,_ Anderson would’ve said, _then why the hell are you doing it, Shepard?_

Nothing about Alenko’s penthouse, about Alenko’s presence in the room and the effect his voice had on Shepard’s cardiovascular system, was ‘just’ a little. Shepard didn’t know what the hell it was, but that was starting to be a theme. And he could live with that, considering all the times he didn’t have a better option.

‘Anything else?’ Alenko asked.

‘Hanar,’ Shepard said. ‘This one, that one—there’s something going on with one of them at the place I’m bunking with the vents and all this pink goo, so…no hanar anything.’

‘This one’s making note of that right now,’ Alenko replied. ‘As for me… I guess what I’m putting down is going to have to be scarring. I never went in for it, you know?’

Shepard thought about the scars he had. The one on his knee, which Alenko was acquainted with by now, and one on the small of his back, and one on his cheek—and countless others that were big or small, whatever shape they came in, whatever skin-graft they were now, whatever pain they represented. Shepard hadn’t gone easy on himself because if he’d wanted easy, he would have taken up selling fishdogs with Tummy Tingling Tuchanka Sauce instead. The most dangerous that got was a customer with indigestion—or somebody opening fire on the Presidium Commons, a meteor hitting, a krogan rampage, a batarian prison break…

‘Yeah,’ Shepard said. ‘Me neither. I have enough of those already.’

‘Yeah.’ Alenko’s mouth twisted—Shepard could taste the scar, not just the ridge in Alenko’s top lip but the air around it, Alenko _almost_ kissing him. ‘Me, too.’

‘But, hey.’ Shepard could clear the air like he cleared his throat—not part of standard training, but when you went up for CO, you learned a few tactics that weren’t for the field only. Or at least, you were supposed to. ‘Other than that…’

He should’ve said something like _sky’s the limit_ or _might as well go as far as the Caleston Rift._

‘Thoughtfully tentative,’ Shepard said instead, ‘it seems like we’ve got a contract.’

‘Safe word,’ Alenko replied. ‘We’re gonna need a safe word.’

Safety was a protocol, Shepard thought. For heading into the fight. Making sure your weapons were primed and your armor was air-tight. Making sure there were contingency plans, a hierarchy of sacrifice. But it wasn’t ever about safety to begin with. It was about the nearest shot you could get to that mark when the ground was shaking and the heavy fire was too bright.

‘Anything come to mind?’ Alenko added.

Shepard thought, _Like where you learned all this from? Who taught you? What they were like and if it was as good for you as it’s been for me? Or if your whole damn throat closed up at the idea that you were giving somebody else the controls to piloting you, in and out of storms, sliding you into whatever docking bay they chose to land in for the night?_

‘Honestly, it’s better if it’s not a word we use all that often, too.’ Alenko’s mouth twisted again, but it was the nicer kind of twisting—matching the twisting of heat in Shepard’s veins when he thought about everything this was building. The penthouse on top of the foundations. Shepard, tied up on the couch. ‘No chance of, uh… Saying it in the wrong moment. But it’s gotta be something you can remember, too.’

More surreal than sitting in an empty holding room, waiting to be debriefed.

_Now, in your own words, Shepard. Tell us what you can remember about Akuze._

Shepard blinked, eyes dry, but less dry than his mouth. He should’ve asked for a drink when he came in—Alenko was the kind of guy to have expensive stuff, like his coffee, too rich for Shepard to digest, too good for Shepard to appreciate.

‘I’m guessing Blasto’s out of the question, then,’ Shepard said.

Testing those limits; finding there weren’t any. Or at least Alenko wasn’t telling him to get his ass back in line before he got written up for insubordination, thrown in the brig to cool off a couple of nights.

It’d never happened to Shepard, not during all his years of service. His record was flawless, until the CLASSIFIED after his last station.

_INACTIVE,_ now.

‘Depends on how often you talk about Blasto, I guess,’ Alenko said.

Patient. Warm. Good. Waiting to get the whole thing down, saving the file for reference so that everything could be safe.

And safety was why they needed a special word— _one word_ to change everything from code red to all systems clear.

There was nowhere else in the galaxy a word like that could exist.

‘I should go,’ Shepard said. His voice sounded tighter than his skin felt.

‘…Yeah. All right.’ Alenko almost looked like he’d been expecting it the whole time. _Don’t let me down, soldier_ wasn’t the same as _Don’t sit tight without looking to exceed expectations._ You couldn’t be a lieutenant all your life—or you could, but it was a real quick way to die.

Aim for the stars, but don’t shoot too high. A soldier was only as good as his last target.

Shepard didn’t have anything in his sights.

‘If that’s what you want… You know how to reach me,’ Alenko added. ‘I’m not gonna keep you here, Shepard. You can take a walk, come back tonight, anything you need. Get some fresh air—as fresh as they’ve got on the Citadel, anyway.’

Shepard did want that—to get some fresh air, to come back tonight. He wanted to get down on his knees, feel Alenko’s weight on his back; he wanted the wait to be over, Alenko’s mouth on his freckles, Alenko’s hands on his scars. He wanted Alenko between his thighs and Alenko’s palm holding his balls, and his face pushed deep into one of Alenko’s pillows, smelling the detergent on his sheets.

He got up and got out instead.

*


	9. Chapter 9

The Citadel could look like Omega at night—if you knew where to go and how long to stay there. Shepard wasn’t looking for that kind of thrill or, if what he’d done at Alenko’s was any indication, any kind of thrill at all.

He was just looking for a walk, a long one, a sense of motion when it came to exercise. Progress, even—watching the buildings, the neighborhood, the zoning areas, the levels changing around him. Going up or going down, so long as it was happening on a staircase, not even escalators, so _his_ feet were what kept him moving, not an engine or a motor or jet fuel or any other mechanism.

Just a guy, a pair of aching legs, a sore knee from an injury he’d won when he was too young to know any better, to be anything but proud of the marks it left on his body. Like a galaxy map, zooming in on a single planet, using it for its resources before leaving the torn up surface behind.

This wasn’t who Shepard was. It never had been. He was a soldier and that meant something, more than a sum of his screw-ups, more than the importance of his high hopes for making a difference in the galaxy.

_Maybe you’ll make waves like that of your_ own _someday, private._

But there was no way in any of the home-worlds Shepard had been to, any of the ones he’d left behind without ever thinking about it as his, that he could trust a word to be safe.

Not even the word safe did that for him anymore. _Safety protocol_ had lost all meaning; _bring as many home safe as you can_ was about as real as Blasto telling a bunch of bad batarians to _enkindle this_. You heard about it happening but you didn’t do it yourself—and when you did, when you’d had one too many and you told a vorcha looking at you funny that ‘This one doesn’t have time for your solid waste excretions,’ the reality of the situation got real nasty, real fast.

Vorcha, apparently, weren’t big Blasto fans. And Shepard couldn’t be friends with somebody who didn’t like Blasto.

He couldn’t look at himself in glass store-fronts, either. He couldn’t open a private message from the one guy—the one soldier, the one superior officer—he actually wanted to hear from. Captain Anderson would take one look at him and know all the hard training, all the years of dropping and giving somebody fifty, all the times coming in top of the class… It hadn’t stuck. It was all water off a drell’s skin.

_Are you hardened yet, soldier? Or is serving your entire race just too damn hard for you?_

A group of kids walked by, laughing, holding Blasto action figures, on their way out of the Cineplex.  The latest Galaxy of Fantasy movie was out, along with _Blasto: Enkindle Another Day_.

‘This one doesn’t have time for your solid waste excretions,’ one of the Blasto toys said.

‘This one will be back,’ the punk holding it added. ‘And next time, it _will_ be taken personally.’

Shepard bought a ticket for the midnight showing. He’d never been a fan of Galaxy of Fantasy, although some of the guys in his class had sworn by it for shaking off excess tension after grueling situation room sessions. Shepard always went to the shooting range and worked on target practice, the moving holographic images of enemies disappearing and reappearing behind cover—test enemies getting harder and hard to pin down the more he turned up the difficulty.

That was before.

Now, Shepard had Blasto to follow on the screen.

Shepard sat without snacks in a theater that was him and an asari couple, a turian watching the asari couple, and a wad of lite-up chewing gum stuck to the seat in front of Shepard’s knees. He scraped it off with an old credit card and trashed both.

He could’ve been in the Clouds with Alenko, tied up on Alenko’s couch. He could’ve been pushing himself to his limits and past them, one touch at a time.

All use of omni-tools during a showing without proper privacy booths purchased beforehand was strictly prohibited. But Shepard didn’t need the extranet to look up the stuff two guys could do when it came to that kind of arrangement. One of the guys back in boot camp, Contreras, said he had this experience with an asari who put her hands around his throat and the whole thing just about blew his mind. ‘Blew my load, too,’ he added, and Shepard headed down to target practice because he’d already signed up for an hour of allotted time.

Alenko didn’t like scarring. Shepard thought about it, the press of something sharp enough or hot enough to break the skin until it died. It wasn’t a kiss that left a couple of marks, something that’d fade away soon enough. It was a permanent thing and Shepard didn’t like it either, rubbing the cap of his knee.

Scars didn’t have any feeling left in them. It was the rest of the stuff around those scars that overcompensated with too _much_ feeling.

_Safe word_.

Shepard had a bunch of those and they all boiled down to _I should go_.

Get out; _bring as many home safe as you can._

_Drop and give me fifty._

_I don’t remember anything after that, sir. Just that there was a thresher maw in front of us and shouting from the entire squad. I went for the nearest weapon, sir, but after that… It’s a blur. No, sir. Yes, sir. I understand that, sir._

_Fifty dead, soldier. Fifty good marines died that night._

On the screen, Blasto enkindled his first explosion. The lights were so bright Shepard didn’t realize he was biting the inside of his mouth until he tasted blood, as though that was the medicine he needed to bring himself back into the present.

He swallowed. It was bitter.

‘If you try to run, I’ve got twelve little tentacles and they can all run faster than you can,’ Blasto said. ‘I love the smell of omni-gel in the morning.’

Shepard took a deep breath and let it out on a chuckle. Blasto was good like that, getting his guys to safety in time. And the idea of him doing push-ups on all those tentacles was enough to make Shepard grin even on a suicide mission—or make him cocky enough to tell his CO there wouldn’t _be_ any suicide.

Not while he was on board.

Whenever he remembered the shouts for help from that night, he blinked so fast it looked like any steady light was exploding, at least on the backs of his eyelids.

He’d paid for his ticket. That was the only thing keeping his ass in his seat until credits rolled and he headed out of the theater again, sweating.

Even cool Citadel night air wasn’t cutting it. Shepard headed up to one of the memorials and sat down on a bench nearby, flooded in neon lights from the shopping level above. It was his own choice—and he’d stopped moving, easing out his bad leg, shoulder blades pinched by the metal bar at his back.

He opened up his private terminal. Nothing new from Alenko, just the old messages Shepard had saved. Listening to Alenko’s voice in private felt dirty enough, some nights; there was no way he was doing it in public.

But that wasn’t what he’d been looking for, anyway.

_Title: Checking up on you_

_From: Captain David Anderson_

Shepard always knew he’d be promoted someday to Admiral and even higher after that. It wasn’t just the admiration talking, either. It was a clear-headed assessment from back in the days when Shepard still knew how to make some of those. The mechanism for that’d been busted along the way after one too many knocks to the head. Now, he just kept moving, running on old fuel, burning up all his reserves.

He opened the message.

_Shepard,_

_Every soldier has that one mission they regret more than anything. Hell, even I’ve got my share of those, more than I care to dwell on. And there’s no way of living with it—no way you can live without it, either._

_You’re a good soldier, Shepard. A damn good one. When the odds are fifty to one, it’s that one that counts._

_Make those marines proud just like they made you proud. It’s what you do with yourself now that’s going to make you the one to watch out there._

_Hell, you might even do me proud while you’re at it._

_Captain Anderson_

It wasn’t the kind of message that was waiting on a reply. But there was another message that was waiting to be answered.

Shepard stood up. He rolled the tension out of his back. He breathed a deep, recycled breath of air, then started back to the Presidium Commons.

He wasn’t the fresh-faced recruit who’d come to the Citadel on his first shore leave, making sure to read all the names written on the memorials he passed by—as though he thought it’d make a difference if one guy, just one stranger, still remembered the honored casualties. If one guy read the fine print instead of staring up at the big statues.

The line was that narrow, Anderson liked to say, between celebrating a hero and attending a funeral. Sometimes, the two were one and the same, but their job was to draw the line and hold it, not question why.

Until it wasn’t a job anymore.

Until sweat and blood went up in flames.

Until you were more than trusting your armor to keep your bones from breaking.

Shepard was on the Citadel. He wasn’t in another system; he wasn’t on a ship; he wasn’t waiting in the shuttle with fifty marines to land on a colony. He wasn’t waking up after that colony was wiped out and the fifty marines gone with it; he was walking up to the front door of the Clouds, the doorman letting him in without asking any questions.

Outside, it was getting close to dawn. It wasn’t there yet, but the sky was gray and the temperature regulation was shifting the air warmer by degrees, only Shepard wasn’t sweating anymore.

He rang Alenko’s bell.

He didn’t have to wait long.

He’d been trained to hear footsteps, even quiet ones, and the alarm system beeped; the door slid open. Alenko didn’t look like he’d been sleeping or thinking about sleep; he smelled like wine and coffee, and he looked incredible.

Incredibly tired, too, but not a hair out of place.

‘Hey,’ Alenko said, the old greeting for a new morning. ‘You…want to come in?’

‘Yeah,’ Shepard said.

‘Then get in here,’ Alenko replied.

Shepard did as he was told, one of the less familiar commands he’d followed and, in a way, one of the most natural. The city was starting to light up for morning—a different quality of light than it had at night—and somewhere out there the last stragglers were just filing out of Prothean Parlor, while the newest batch of Alliance recruits on the nearest training station were falling out of bed to _Reveille_.

It was a good thing Shepard’s omni-tool alarm only went off when he was at home. And he usually woke up a few seconds before it started playing anyway, waiting for the music to give him the right kind of kick in his ass to start the day.

‘Gonna kiss you,’ Alenko added, and Shepard nodded, and Alenko pushed him hard against the wall. Shepard didn’t trust the wall as much as he trusted Alenko on the other side—that he could bring one of those things down but not the other.

Then, Alenko’s tongue pushed past Shepard’s lips, doing that thing that left Shepard feeling like he was a cracked code or a broken airlock. His lips parted for it like his legs would’ve parted for Alenko’s hands, but Alenko was holding him by the hips and no lower, rubbing his sides, the muscles there tighter than they were tired.

The kiss left Shepard breathing without rhythm and Alenko’s lips raw, roughened by stubble. Shepard hadn’t closed his mouth, licking the corner, and Alenko went after his tongue next, scraping his teeth over the tip and sucking it in.

He really, really knew how to kiss. And how to hold a guy up and make it seem like it wasn’t heavy, or how to help a guy believe heaviness wasn’t a bad thing.

And how to talk dirty over a private line. How to make a place he only stayed in some nights feel like a space somebody called home.

Shepard’s lips were swollen, his heart in survival mode, lungs full of too much oxygen and ribs ready to crack again if they kept filling up at this rate.

‘That a Kessler in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me, Alenko?’ Shepard asked.

‘This one can’t believe your jokes actually make him laugh,’ Alenko replied.

They both laughed—together—until kissing again made that impossible, sounds swallowed, disappearing before they could choke anyone.

They made it to the kitchen table, where they’d been trying to hash out the terms of their contract. _I was never an integral player during treaty negotiations, Alenko,_ Shepard tried to say, but when he opened his mouth to say it Alenko ran his tongue over Shepard’s bottom lip, against his teeth, and the only sound that came out of Shepard was a groan, flanked by an empty coffee mug falling over on its side behind him.

Shepard righted it before it rolled off the edge. Instincts never died.

‘We can take things slow,’ Alenko said, pulling away just enough that words and breath could exist between them. Small words, small breaths, nothing as deep as Shepard needed them to be. But he kept after it anyway, kept trying, because all he knew was how to be stubborn—past limits and despite complications. ‘That’s actually the only way _to_ do something like this. Just to see if it’s something you really want.’

With Alenko’s hands on Shepard’s hips, palm rubbing at his dick through his jeans, it had to be obvious how Shepard really wanted it. ‘Wanting’s…not going to be the problem, Alenko,’ he said.

‘Okay.’ Alenko ran his thumb along the zipper and Shepard had to admit he was grateful for the table behind him, the edge pressing into the backs of his thighs, doing everything it could to keep him on his feet. ‘That’s— Fair enough. I guess what I meant was that we’ll take things slow to see if it’s something you need—maybe even something you like.’ He paused, his mouth at the stubble on Shepard’s chin. ‘Those two things…can be different. We want things that aren’t good for us all the time.’

‘You sound like you’re talking from experience,’ Shepard said.

He wanted to tell Alenko everything—about what it meant to be a sole survivor, to be the only man left standing. How the idea of living just one life for himself was too much and he had to keep side-stepping the issue of living fifty more of them for fifty other guys.

If he didn’t, nobody else would. They’d be lost on that colony forever, along with the civilians a cleanup squad had buried. No names. No memorial. Maybe a flag in the ground, one flag for everyone.

So it was more than fifty. The body count just kept piling up. Shepard pressed his face against Alenko’s cheek, smelling the soap on his skin, the sweat, the coffee, the aftershave. The stubble was enough to burn Shepard’s lips if he scraped them too hard over Alenko’s jaw, climbing up to a dark sideburn. His hands shaped Alenko’s shoulders to his elbows, forearms bare against his rolled-up sleeves, palms stopping once they hit bear skin.

‘Akuze,’ Shepard said.

Alenko paused.

‘That’s my safe-word,’ Shepard explained. ‘Akuze. We’re going to need a safe word if you’re going to tie me up.’

‘Akuze,’ Alenko repeated. He didn’t ask _what happened, soldier_ , and Shepard didn’t tell him he couldn’t remember, sir. ‘You’re sure won’t forget it?’

‘Never,’ Shepard said.

*


	10. Chapter 10

Alenko watched him undress in the starlight from above, Shepard rucking his t-shirt up to his armpits before tugging it off, disappearing into the darkness of the fabric for a few quick but dizzying seconds. Then, Shepard waited for Alenko to tell him to take off his jeans, too, the slight nod and the changing shadows on Alenko’s face giving Shepard the go-ahead.

‘On the bed,’ Alenko told him when he was finished.

Shepard was a good soldier, a damn good one—if the best of his old COs were straight shooters, and they were. Shepard didn’t have to look at his commendations to know what he looked like on the books, what his ball-busting TOs thought of him.

But a guy could follow orders and still not pull through the promises he’d made when he’d taken on the armor, the insignia, and of course the commission.

Shepard got on the bed. Alenko turned him over and then the hands guiding Shepard were gone; the only view Shepard had was of the sheets, wrinkling and rumpling under his grip.

‘Take off your boxers,’ Alenko said.

Shepard shifted his weight to one side before he reached around and hooked his thumb under the elastic at his waist. He had to arch his hips and push his ass in the air half an inch to roll the fabric down to his thighs, down to his knees, kicking free of it after. There was no armor, no insignia, no commission. There were orders to follow but there was also a safe word.

_Akuze_.

When Shepard closed his eyes, he didn’t see flashes of light, volleys of incendiary rounds. All he heard was the sound of his own breathing, not quick and rasping and trapped against a mouthpiece, just a few hitches here and there when he remembered Alenko was watching—studying—him.

Naked.

It wasn’t as though Alenko’s eyes on him were like Alenko’s hands on him, but Shepard could feel them, even if they touched him in another way. Heat pooled at the base of his spine, on the insides of his thighs and at the backs of his knees. Sweat beaded the side of his throat over a pulse that kept hammering out the beat, _stubborn, stubborn, stubborn,_ and the muscles of his stomach tightened against the scar running through them.

Extra sit-ups took care of that damage, keeping the severed abs as hard as they were when he’d grown three inches after his sixteenth birthday, practically overnight.

Things weren’t easier then. He only had to remind himself of that most of the time.

‘Okay,’ Alenko said, his voice coming closer. ‘Looking good, Shepard.’ He pressed Shepard’s name between his shoulder blades as he pressed himself against the backs of Shepard’s thighs but neither one lasted, cool air hitting the flesh where hot breath had warmed a simple oval over the vertebrae. ‘Now turn over.’

Shepard rolled, like old Alliance brass always did for a good command.

He was expecting ropes or maybe some kind of tight wire, the electric coils he saw running in the sub-levels of abandoned facilities on lockdown during a clearance sweep with a smaller team. He was waiting for something thick and strong to wrap around him while Alenko, hand against Shepard’s stomach, finger running alongside the scar beneath his navel and through the hair around the scar, was holding something too thin to get a good look at, tangled around his fingers.

Shepard’s wrists were ready to be tied over his head—not the same position as he took when he stood in the debriefing room, fingers clasped around his pulse, sleeves rolled down, collar as stiff as his shoulders.

But instead, he felt something move like a whisper against his skin, something so slim and soft it didn’t make any sense. It followed Kaidan’s shadow, Kaidan leaning closer and using the fronts of his thighs to spread Shepard’s legs.

It was just a string, not even the durable stuff Alliance used to sew on a loose button or patch torn fatigues. It cut into the veins beneath the heels of Shepard’s palms, not too loose, not too tight, knuckles bumping the headboard. When Shepard took a breath, he could feel the thing straining with his heartbeat, ready to snap.

‘You’re tense,’ Alenko said. ‘But you don’t have to be, Shepard. I’m gonna tell you the objective.’

_Don’t break the string_ , Shepard thought.

‘Don’t break the string,’ Alenko said.

Shepard regulated his breathing so that it came out shallower, so that his lungs didn’t fill all the way, so that the string didn’t strain again while Alenko wound it around Shepard’s chest. For the objective—but also for himself.

And maybe, more than a little, for Alenko.

Alenko, who’d wrapped the next length around Shepard’s throat. The slimmest pressure snaked against the vein at each pulse point and Shepard knew his eyes were flaring—distrust, disbelief, and dissonance. Nothing in his training ever told him to let another guy get you around the throat, but Alenko soothed his touch around it when Shepard swallowed.

  
  
ART BY TRILLIATH   


Slowly, like a Presidium pet that’d asked to be collared, Shepard eased into it. Alenko’s eyes on his eyes, Alenko’s fingers on his throat—and it would’ve been easy, too easy, for him to finish Shepard off right then and there. Shepard could think of a hundred ways; he knew there were at least a hundred more.

Alenko’s breath hummed through his throat, echoing in his chest, down through his palms as he stroked Shepard’s through. From jaw to shoulder to jaw again, up and down, the pulse racing and calming, about as lost as Shepard felt.

‘Don’t break the string,’ Alenko repeated.

Shepard didn’t swallow. He held his line—which was the string, now, curved around the shape of his body, too close to his center to get a good vantage point.

Nothing happened.

Shepard’s heart kept beating. The string didn’t cut off blood or air flow to his brain but that didn’t mean Shepard couldn’t feel every place it strained against his skin.

Alenko didn’t forget the part of Shepard that wanted him the most, either, the string pulled taut under Shepard’s balls. His hard dick bobbed against his stomach, while the rest of him was forced to rest—and it, too, waited.

Adrenaline affected time the way Red Sand affected perception. Pupils dilating, muscles aching, skin that barely fit the body beneath. Only anticipation was left in that place and instead of crushing it beneath the heel of his boot Shepard fell into it, until Alenko put a hand on his knee, squeezing it against his palm.

Then, he moved down on the bed, naked and toned and steady, tying Shepard’s ankles to the bottom corners of the bed. 

That wasn’t all. With Alenko, there was always more. He traced the scar on Shepard’s belly and his wrist almost, _almost_ touched the head of Shepard’s dick, before his fingers moved up Shepard’s chest to scrape his nail in a full circle around Shepard’s nipple, between parallel lines of delicate string.

Shepard had learned—under Alenko’s hands; under Alenko’s acting orders—that he liked it rough, that the pinch and the tug made his dick jump and his thighs shake. But he couldn’t strain against it, arch his hips forward or even tilt his head back, because the string was there and he couldn’t break it.

_Don’t break the string._ Alenko’s voice settled in place behind Shepard to bolster him and there was no soldier.

There were no soldiers.

There were only two people in the room, living their lives against the tension in one string. And the only rule was _don’t break anything,_ Shepard finally—finally—able to see the concentration, the light and the shadow, playing off Alenko’s face

It took all Shepard had, reserves and regular energy, not to move. To hold still while Alenko bit his ear and sucked it between his lips and teeth, the tip of his tongue running along the edge of the lobe. When Alenko touched Shepard’s dick Shepard couldn’t arch into it, and the only friction he got was from how Alenko moved his palm, slow at first, until the muscles in his forearms started working out a rhythm.

Base to head, base to head, pumping the vein, balls straining against the string. Shepard held it all in because he had to, because that was basic training, because that was a lifetime of drop-and-give-me-fifties. Because that was who he was, and who Alenko was had tied it up with one simple string to help hold him down and hold it in. Then, Alenko did everything he could to make holding on impossible, rubbing his thumb against the slit at the head of Shepard’s dick, fingertip coming away sticky and making Shepard groan.

‘Don’t come yet,’ Alenko said.

_Don’t break the string._

There was always a second objective, something to blindside even the best CO, and adapting to restrictions was more than half the battle.

Good aim, mostly, was the rest. Not pissing the wrong people off. Having a turian or two on your side when you could.

Having somebody you could trust at your back—somebody you could look to when it all went down, a name and a resolution and a face.

When Alenko pulled back, Shepard almost moved after him. But he couldn’t break it; he couldn’t break. Alenko ran both hands down one leg, untying one ankle, the string falling loose against the sheets. He hooked Shepard’s leg up and Shepard was the one who had to compensate, who had to keep himself from moving too much while his knee and thigh were crooked up to his chest.

Alenko’s dick was pressed against Shepard’s ass, not quite between the cheeks. It was sticky, too, mixed with Shepard’s sweat, the head rubbing the scar centered at the base of Shepard’s spine. But Alenko’d stopped jerking him off and was holding his dick instead, still and in place, as fragile as the string knotted around Shepard’s wrist and under his balls.

Even the smallest breath tugged the string against sensitive skin. Shepard could feel where it cut against the flesh, not tight enough for scarring, but tight enough for little red lines to fade slowly across his body after. In the morning, they’d be gone.

Right now, they were close to breaking him.

_Akuze._

Shepard was never going to forget it.

He waited. Alenko tugged his nipple, swiping his thumb over the head—the same technique he used on Shepard’s dick but smaller, somehow, and also bigger at the same time.

_Don’t break the string._

As fragile as it was, it held. Tenuous, maybe, and the whole length of it shivering, until Alenko tightened his grip and pumped Shepard to—then over—the edge.

Shepard came when Alenko said his name, the green light instead of the red, the darkness that followed like an old friend. A hundred dumbass things ran through his head, like getting the bed dirty, like the shape of Alenko’s fingers, like the one crooked breath that caught in Alenko’s throat—from the heat, from Shepard’s body, from Shepard’s weight and his scars and what it took to keep him together.

He didn’t think about the rules or the string. And when he blinked, eyes focusing, coming down from pleasure slow but all at once, he hadn’t broken it.

It was still there, even if Alenko wasn’t untying it right away.

He traced the lines it made on Shepard’s body instead, from hip to hip, bisecting a scar, running under Shepard’s balls, which still felt heavy. Alenko stopped at Shepard’s wrists, _stubborn_ , and at his throat, _stubborn_ , shaping the pulse with the tips of his fingers.

‘How was it?’ Kaidan asked.

Not _like_ he cared but that he _did_ care, for whatever cockeyed reason. Something more than they’d worked out between them, put down for posterity in a datapad notefile.

‘Would’ve said the safe word if I didn’t like it,’ Shepard replied.

His voice echoed against the string, against Alenko’s touch, in the back of his mouth and against his teeth. Alenko rubbed his stomach, his scar, blunt nails making Shepard’s hair shiver in a single line from his navel to his dick.

‘Yeah,’ Alenko said. ‘It was pretty damn good for me, too, Shepard.’

Shepard let the string stay where it was around his throat. Breathing in, breathing out, and nothing breaking when he did.

*


	11. Chapter 11

Sometime before the skylight above told them it was morning, Alenko untied him. Inch by inch, the string he’d used fell away, even though in Shepard’s experience knots were always easier to make than they were to _un_ make. And he wasn’t just talking about not-so-batarian bondage, either.

He rolled over onto his side when Alenko wrapped an arm around him, and followed the course of slow kisses down his throat to his broken collarbone, healed crooked on the field with only a half-empty pack of omnigel to keep the bone set, and over his shoulder, and down to his chest. Alenko’s mouth followed a few of those lines like he was an elcor trying to read Shepard’s fortune in the marks he’d left behind.

They weren’t natural. How long a life was didn’t just depend on what a guy was born with, after all.

‘So,’ Alenko said, muffled against one of Shepard’s nipples. Hot breath skirted the skin and Shepard jumped to attention, half Alliance training and half personal preference, a balance he didn’t know one body could strike. ‘That…worked out pretty well, I think.’

‘Considering I ran out on you halfway through,’ Shepard replied.

The things you weren’t proud of—you repeated those. Over and over, until the light you shone on it lost meaning, and there was no shadow to stick it behind. Alenko’s lips pressed together and his hair was tickling Shepard’s bicep, one of those small touches that made him shiver for new reasons. It wasn’t important; it didn’t mean anything. But Shepard felt it anyway.

‘Well,’ Alenko admitted, ‘I’ve been through worse.’

‘Me too.’ Shepard didn’t know what to do with his hands—whether he should put them on Alenko’s shoulders or card them through his hair, or touch his hip, the curve of his ass that looked pretty great from behind. Instead, he held onto the sheets, but that was because this was his first contract, whereas Alenko already knew what he was doing.

And that was how it was supposed to be. One guy who knew the ropes showed the rookie how to navigate them. And sometimes those ropes were made out of string, and the point wasn’t breaking anything.

Shepard sucked in a breath, one that filled his chest and stomach before he let it out again. He was breathing the same air as always, but not in the same rhythms. Besides, when his body lifted, Alenko rose with it. When it evened out, Alenko followed along for the ride. It was the weight that held Shepard down, weight he didn’t have to fight, and the hand Alenko kept at Shepard’s hip was steady. Holding on, testing the edges of an old scar with his thumb.

Did they talk about it? Was Shepard going to be debriefed? The only thing he could count on knowing was that Alenko kept breathing and so did he. In tandem, not exactly keeping even time, but when it came together it worked.

‘I didn’t do anything that made you uncomfortable?’ Alenko added. His voice was sleepy, casual, practically a hum that cradled Shepard’s skin. A part of him and outside of him at the same time. The muscles in Alenko’s arms, too, were as hot as ever, the veins pumping, fingers that didn’t have to be blunt to be strong. When the edge of Alenko’s thumbnail caught the raised, dead flesh of the scar, Shepard shivered because of what he couldn’t feel, not because of what he did. ‘First rounds can be kind of hit or miss.’

‘I don’t miss,’ Shepard said.

Alenko chuckled—and that was about when Shepard realized it sounded like a joke. Not even one he was proud of. Not even one he’d meant to be stupid about.

‘The galaxy feels upside-down sometimes,’ Shepard said. ‘Like I was meant to have tentacles and I got arms, or like I _have_ tentacles but I _think_ I got arms.’

‘I’m an L2 Biotic.’ Every word Alenko said, even the easy ones, came out like it was a rebuilding project, taking rubble and turning it into something whole again. ‘So I think I know a little about what you mean. …Tentacles might be too hard to tie up, though.’

‘No kidding.’ Not that it was impossible, Shepard thought—just harder than everything else. There was always bound to be something harder. ‘Plus, it wouldn’t be easy with the orders and everything. _This one wants that one to caress this one’s tentacles with that one’s tentacles..._ ’

‘Yeah,’ Kaidan agreed. ‘It’d never work.’

Shepard’s fingers twitched where they were. ‘So I guess we’re good, then,’ he said. ‘Although some people might define this kind of thing as bad, technically.’

‘I guess I prefer to use naughty.’ Alenko’s mouth shaped the word over Shepard’s nipple. ‘Less margin for error there. Less question of meaning bad in the good way, or…in the bad one.’

‘If you’re asking me about doing this again or even regularly, Alenko,’ Shepard said, ‘the answer’s yes.’

‘Okay,’ Alenko replied. ‘Okay, that’s…good.’

_Pretty damn good_ , Shepard thought.

He drifted in and out for a while, body tired but the rest of him not feeling it. Alenko was still draped over him, still all warm, naked muscle, and now and then Shepard could still feel the string, holding back to keep from breaking it until he remembered Alenko had taken it all off and it wasn’t there anymore.

The brain played all kinds of tricks on a guy. Shepard finally drifted off, feeling his muscles twitch—just not hard enough to jerk him out of heavy sleep.

He woke sweating; he always did. Bleary, sunspots in his eyes, the marks already faded off his skin. He tried to remember where they’d been but all that was left was a scar with Alenko’s hand covering it. One long finger spanned the length, not quite running parallel because the tips were touching in a narrow v.

Shepard slid out of bed. The contract didn’t apply for after the session—according to the contract itself—and there was no way he’d be awake enough, alive enough, to face the sunlight pouring in from the open glass above without doing his usual routine.

He headed into the living room to start it off—the stuff he could do without the right equipment, or a bar he could trust to hold his weight in the closet—and went into fifty sit-ups, easy, even if parts of him were sore from the night before.

Then it was push-ups, another fifty, and he was muttering twenty-four to the floor when he realized Alenko was watching him.

‘Next time,’ Alenko said, ‘you should wake me.’

‘Don’t know how late you sleep,’ Shepard said. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. ‘We should put it in the contract.’

‘Submissive should remember to wake the dominant in the morning before leaving the bed.’ Alenko crossed the floor to the table where the datapad was still waiting. Thirty; thirty-one. ‘Got it. I’ll put it in right now and then make some coffee.’

‘So that’d be something like your hard limit?’ Shepard asked. His nose came dangerously close to the polished floor, cleaner than he was used to. He felt the muscles along his sides and down over his ass to his thighs stretching tight, pushed past _their_ limits, and still holding strong. He felt alive and apparently the reason for that was Alenko knowing how to wrap him up like a present he was giving to himself. Hell, Shepard still smelled like the place in The Clouds, Alenko’s aftershave, his soap and his shampoo, mixing with Shepard’s sweat. Forty-three; forty-four.

The last few were the hardest. Shepard heard the datapad beep and the chair slide out from the table, even though Alenko didn’t sit down.

‘A requirement limit, more like,’ Alenko said.

‘Fifty,’ Shepard answered, and lowered himself to the ground.

‘I could get used to watching you do that, though,’ Alenko admitted. ‘…You should probably do some stretches after, loosen the body up a bit.’

Shepard, already straightening, thinking about making some more of that fancy coffee he didn’t even like that much, paused between the couch and Alenko’s chair. Not a tactical position. A better soldier, one who hadn’t been out of commission for so long, would never have let somebody maneuver him into the vulnerable middle ground.

But this was Alenko’s place. There was a safe word here, even if the idea of something like that didn’t exist anywhere else in the galaxy.

Well, except for in the sub-levels of clubs like they had on Omega, Shepard supposed, but he wasn’t going to go down there.

Not unless Alenko was the one taking him.

The idea, all shadows and heat and something tight clamped around his wrists, went straight to Shepard’s dick, not his head. Maybe the rest of him was just along for the ride where Alenko was concerned, because he sure as hell wasn’t thinking like himself—not to mention how good it felt to get the reprieve, like shore leave from his own mind.

‘Does it say anything in there about me making the coffee?’ Shepard asked.

‘We’re off the contract right now,’ Alenko replied. ‘Better not to start with something twenty-four seven, just…test it out. See how it goes. Besides, I’ve got my stuff, you’ve got yours… I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee, though. I wouldn’t turn it down.’

‘Me neither.’ Shepard messed with the filters and went on instinct when it came to measuring the grinds; the machine bleeped at him until he scooped some out and put it back into the air-sealed bag. Only then did it start boiling the water, until Shepard couldn’t smell anything else—no aftershave, no soap, no shampoo. All that was left was the tang of sweat resting somewhere beneath. ‘…Used to drink what amounted to diesel fuel during my last commission, though. Mess cook wouldn’t know coffee if it came up and told him this one was there to pour itself into the pot, no questions asked.’

‘Sounds like a good time,’ Alenko said.

Shepard didn’t look back over his shoulder; that wasn’t part of the arrangement. And even if they were only on contract for a predetermined amount of time, Shepard stretched up to reach the mugs on the top shelf, rolling out his back on the process, giving Alenko a decent view.

‘Nothing left to show what we were up to last night, huh?’ Shepard said.

‘Yeah,’ Alenko replied. ‘I still don’t like leaving scars.’

‘Not much room left to leave them, anyway.’ Shepard poured two mugs, black and hot as an engine room during a coolant meltdown.

‘Nothing in mine,’ Alenko said. ‘Honestly, it’s good enough to stand up on its own.’

‘Everybody needs a team to work with sometimes,’ Shepard replied. ‘You have any sugar?’

‘Here.’ Alenko stood, coming close, Shepard in his boxers and t-shirt and nothing else and Alenko only in boxers—and when Alenko leaned past him it pressed Shepard against the kitchen counter, dick scraping the very edge. All these things that were supposed to hurt—but for some reason, with Alenko, they didn’t. ‘How much sugar are you talking about here?’

He tore open one packet, the inside of his elbow bumping Shepard’s ribs. ‘One more should do it,’ Shepard said, and Alenko tore open the second, stirring it in. The liquid got cloudy before it cleared again, only halfway.

Alenko rested his empty hand on Shepard’s stomach. Shepard, still pressed against the edge of the counter, lifted the coffee to his lips and blew on it to cool it off. Steam rising from the cup wasn’t the only thing making his face hot.

‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘Probably too good for me, even.’

‘You can get used to it,’ Alenko replied. ‘The good stuff. The really, really good stuff.’

Shepard’s belly swelled against Alenko’s fingers as he drew in a breath of that fresh-roasted coffee smell. He didn’t have to say it, but he was going to try.

When the coffee was finished, Alenko offered him the choice—shower or bath—and Shepard said what the hell to the special occasion, to a bath he hadn’t enjoyed for so many years there was no point in keeping track anymore. It was temperature-controlled with Jacuzzi jets and everything; he sat in it naked across from Alenko while Alenko soaped him up, telling him when to lift his arms, when to put them down again. He rubbed Shepard’s shaved head and his half-shaved jaw, the back of his neck, his shoulders, the center of his spine. He rubbed all the way under the surface of the water to Shepard’s hips and between his thighs. Their mouths never touched. Shepard never sighed.

Somehow, it was the cleanest he’d ever felt and the dirtiest he’d ever been.

‘You know you’re a complicated guy, Alenko?’ he asked, while Alenko worked the shampoo into his own hair.

‘You’re not so bad yourself, Shepard,’ Alenko replied.

Shepard helped him to wash the suds out, brushing them back off his temple, little streaks of white that disappeared in the water. When Alenko caught his wrist and kissed him, Shepard supposed he’d been waiting for it the whole time—and wanting it even longer than that. Alenko’s tongue, Alenko’s lips, Alenko’s teeth. They knew when to bite and when to suck and when to rest, drawing each breath from the center of Shepard’s lungs before swallowing it down like it wasn’t all that heavy.

‘You’ve got a nice mouth,’ Alenko said.

Shepard realized he should’ve said it first.

‘You’re not so bad yourself, Alenko,’ he said instead, and when they both laughed, Alenko’s tongue pushed inside again, deeper. The water was so hot Shepard felt like he was swimming through fever and that was what burned him clean. 

Soft towels came after, white and big, nothing like the rough Alliance-issue they got in the dorms. Shepard got out of the bath first, levering himself up with the muscles in his forearms straining, Alenko watching him again—or still, or closer, or some combination of all three.

‘This one okay?’ Shepard asked, dripping on the tiles as he reached to the shelf. Alenko nodded, body hidden by the soapy water, eyebrows dark over his eyes. Shepard pulled it down and scrubbed the small of his back, between his thighs, bending down to get at his ankles and work his way up his calves to his knees.

‘You missed a spot,’ Alenko said, pointing to his own shoulder. ‘Right there, right between…’

He didn’t finish the thought. He stood instead, also dripping wet, sluicing himself off with his hands—a method Shepard recognized from the locker room showers.

Shepard didn’t look until Alenko cleared his throat and said, ‘See something you don’t like?’

Shepard lifted his eyes, like an awkward kid again, with more elbows and knees than muscle, too skinny to pack on any real pounds. He’d spent too much time running back then and he’d learned to turn it around, to be the one doing the chasing instead.

Alenko’s skin was flushed from the hot water and his hair was curling at his temples but he smoothed it down when he dried it with a towel, slicking it back with something out of a bottle so it’d hold in place.

The work that went into the guy Shepard saw, the guy Shepard barely knew—his lips half-swollen, his pupils half-blown—was the elcor in the room, Shepard looking at Alenko’s throat and his chest, his hips and his thighs. His dick, too, before Alenko moved past Shepard for a towel, wrapping it around the flat muscles of his waist, then taking Shepard’s from his hands to find that spot he’d missed.

‘Right there,’ he repeated. The terrycloth was a little rougher than it looked, not exactly as fluffy as a cloud.

Shepard stood in front of him—not standing at attention, just being there—and Alenko rubbed down his biceps to his elbows, his elbows to his wrists, his stomach from side to side and up and down. He went over the scar instead of around it. In the daytime, it didn’t feel a thing.

‘You can borrow some clothes, if you want,’ Alenko said, taking out a pair of black briefs. Shepard watched while he put them on—stared, more like—snapping the elastic at his hips when he was finished, the curve in the small of his back and the dimples flanking his spine hidden only halfway beneath the dark cotton. ‘I don’t know what your plans are for today, but I’ve got…’ He paused, lips twisting. ‘A class to teach, actually.’

‘Biotics?’ Shepard asked.

‘Alliance program.’ Alenko’s smile settled, one droplet of water sliding off his jaw and landing by his feet. ‘It’s, uh, new. But I guess I have kind of a vested interest in it getting off the ground—and staying there.’

It was better than having a vested interest in avoiding Conrad Verner by the coffee and protein machine in the break room. Shepard realized he was chuckling after he’d started, rubbing the back of his neck until it was red.

‘Thanks for the offer on the clothes,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got something to change into back home. Wouldn’t want to make you late for duty, either.’

‘I wouldn’t let you make me late for duty,’ Alenko replied.

He wouldn’t.

That was one of the things Shepard liked about him, one of the few things Shepard could define. And he didn’t even need a contract to put it into words.

Alenko stayed where he was, close to the doorway, the steam in the air settling on his shoulders and making his skin look so damn soft. Shepard wanted to run his hands all over it, touch him from his chest to his dick, from his shoulders to his ass, maybe put his mouth on Kaidan’s thighs and drag his teeth all the way to his knees. The hunger he couldn’t name flashed like two bright shots in the darkness, like flares being lit, a signal that help was on its way—backup, reinforcement, fresh troops—and they were going to get there on time. Shepard swallowed the urge down, remembering Alenko’s mouth on him instead.

It’d come. Shepard would come, Alenko would come—and maybe it didn’t have to be that long of a wait, either.

Shepard zipped up his fly in the bedroom, finding his jeans where he’d dropped them the night before. His clothes thrown all over was only mess in the room not counting the sheets, which Shepard did according to dorm-check standards, folding the corners down. When he looked up, pulling his t-shirt on, Alenko was standing in the doorway, arms folded, rubbing his bicep with his thumb.

‘How’s it look?’ Shepard asked, straightening.

‘What’s better than pretty good?’ Alenko replied.

‘Pretty great.’ Shepard felt the cotton of his shirt clinging to his damp skin, but it’d dry off by the time he got to where he was going.

‘Pretty great, then.’ Alenko followed Shepard into the kitchen, which still smelled like the coffee they’d shared. When Shepard got a good look at him, he was paying more attention to the guy in the room than the view from his window. ‘Call me later, Shepard.’

It wasn’t a request.

‘You know I will,’ Shepard replied, and left with his keycard the same way he’d let himself in.

The Presidium Commons were as clean as ever, maybe too clean—considering what was underneath them, the sub-levels holding up the gardens and the memorial parks and the shopping districts, strip malls that switched out of their stores faster than Blasto could reload a standard firearm. Shepard looked back up at The Clouds, then headed toward the lower levels to tell Prothean Palace he was handing in notice of resignation. No more night-duty for this one, Shepard thought.

‘Tell Verner I said good luck,’ Shepard added, handing in his badge and the private-issue Kessler and his employee discount and ID card. ‘He’s going to need it, but he’s got sharp eyes, keen instincts. He’ll keep this place safe.’

Or manage to embezzle the fortune right at his fingertips.

Or send the place sky-high by accident, his only weapons a private-issue Kessler and a cup of coffee.

Live wires. Every planet had their share of those. Some got lit up and others fizzled out and you never could tell which it’d be.

Shepard headed back up in an elevator with two asari holding hands and two turians gossiping about some popular elcor actor based out of Omega. He was the only one to get off on his level, where the Alliance Embassy was stationed.

It was the first time he’d ever been all the way up there, higher than the clouds. He’d been invited—to get a look at his medal of honor, the one he was being given for his service on Akuze—but he hadn’t accepted the invitation.

The place was shiny—he’d give it that. Everybody was dressed in blues, fatigues and polished Alliance pins on their chest pockets, except for Shepard, who’d turned his in for safe keeping a few months ago.

‘Lieutenant Shepard?’ The officer at the front terminal was one Shepard recognized, not a name on a plaque or buried in a lost file somewhere, but… Jenkins. That was it. They had him pushing paper now—or maybe he’d asked for it. ‘I mean—Shepard.’

‘Jenkins.’ Shepard nodded. It was like a salute, for a guy who wasn’t dressed to impress. ‘I’m here to talk to Captain Anderson.’

‘I can schedule a comm-call,’ Jenkins said, ‘but you might have to wait a few hours. Different schedule on Arcturus Station.’

‘Understood, soldier,’ Shepard said.

He sat on one of the benches by the window. When he realized the view was the same as the one he got out of Alenko’s living room—that it wasn’t about perspective or distance; that everybody had their own hard limits—his shoulders straightened.

‘Shepard,’ Anderson said, sounding and looking the same as always when Shepard was finally patched through. ‘Good to have you back, soldier.’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Shepard said, and snapped to attention. 

**END**


End file.
